Sand Island Lighthouse

The Sand Island Light is a lighthouse located on the northern tip of Sand Island, one of the Apostle Islands, in Lake Superior in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, near the city of Bayfield. Currently owned by the National Park Service and part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, part of reference number 77000145. Listed in the Library of Congress Historic American Buildings Survey, WI-313. The Sand Island lighthouse consists of an octagonal tower and attached two-story dwelling, all built from brown sandstone cut from the promontory on which it stands. Visitors to the lighthouse today can still see marks on the rock ledges in front of the lighthouse that were made in the process of quarrying. The lighthouse was built to a standard Gothic Revival design already used at several light stations in Wisconsin and Michigan. The lighthouses previously built at McGulpin Point, Eagle Harbor, and White River, along with the St. Clair Flats Canal beacon (no longer standing), follow the same plan, while the Chambers Island lighthouse is a “mirror twin” to the Sand Island structure, with the same design reversed right to left. Unlike these others, which were made out of brick, the Sand Island lighthouse is constructed of brown sandstone, quarried from the ledge where it sits. Subsequently, additional stone excavated at Sand Island was transported to Passage Island near Isle Royale where it was used to construct an addition