Shedding light

The lighthouse at Prince Edward Point is one of two County lighthouses recently granted clemency by the Federal government. To the left is the replacement beacon.

Feds save two County lighthouses, but make no effort to maintain them

Standing at the County’s most remote point, overlooking Timber and False Duck Islands, an old lighthouse stands, crumbling, forgotten by most except for a flight of swallows who have made homes in the soffits.

The Prince Edward Point lighthouse, also known as the Point Traverse lighthouse, has been out of commission for decades, having been replaced half a century ago by a painted iron beacon with a large bulb at the top, now powered by a solar panel.

The door to the attached lighthouse keeper’s dwelling is nailed shut. Its windows are boarded up, save the window overlooking the water, removed by vandals and never replaced, allowing the elements in. In faded lettering peeking out from an overgrown bush, a wooden plaque states it had been erected in 1881.

Following a decision by Parks Canada, this lighthouse, along with a crumbling ruin on Scotch Bonnet Island, west of Nicholson Island, have been declared heritage lighthouses. The Point Traverse lighthouse is the responsibility of Parks Canada, while the Scotch Bonnet lighthouse is the property of the Canadian Wildlife Service.

The decision came just before the May 29 deadline for the Ministry of the Environment to decide which lighthouses should be declared surplus and which should be granted heritage designations. The ministry took petitions from the public, looking for groups willing to offer stewardship for these lighthouses.

Since their designation last month, neither department has done anything to maintain the lighthouses. Marc Seguin, executive director of Save Our Lighthouses and author of the newly published For Want of a Lighthouse, says the manager of the Thousand Island National Park, the body deemed responsible for the newly designated Point Traverse lighthouse, didn’t even know his park was now responsible for it.

The long and complicated story of preserving lighthouses began in 2008, when the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act was enacted. At that time, most lighthouses were the responsibility of DFO, now called the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO, unable to maintain the more than 900 lighthouses across the country, declared most of them surplus.

“They don’t want to maintain the heritage character of these buildings. That’s not the business they’re in, to be fair. That’s really not what they do,” says Seguin.

Instead, DFO offered community groups the opportunity to buy the lighthouses for a token amount. Groups have to agree to maintain those protected lighthouses in perpetuity, by maintaining their current condition, restoring them or using them as a cultural learning experience.

They also have to keep allowing DFO to use them.

“If a community group acquires a lighthouse, they must be willing to enter into an agreement with fisheries and oceans to allow fisheries and oceans to enter the property to maintain the light that’s there,” says Seguin. “So they want to keep the light on that structure, but they don’t want to maintain the structure. It’s a dodge.”

Mark says for buildings on the water, even the most basic maintenance can be costly.

“Painting a lighthouse is kind of like painting a bridge. You start at the top, and by the time you’re at the bottom, you’re almost ready to go back to the top again.”

There is $1 million in the fishery budget to transfer funds to groups taking over lighthouses, but that amount is meant to stretch across all lighthouses that receive designation.

“I think putting the onus on local communities was the right approach,” says Seguin. “But then to say, a little friends of the local lighthouse organization now has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to maintain the lighthouse year after year after year… and then also to conserve the building—which means at the very least preserve it.”

Because the two newly designated lighthouses in the County are the responsibility of other federal departments, that is not a concern, although the response Seguin received from the manager of the Thousand Island National Park was worrisome.

Three other lighthouses with petitions to the ministry did not receive designation: one at Point Petre and on Main Duck and False Duck Islands.

The Prince Edward Land Trust has made an application to acquire them.

“They’re certainly historic lighthouses; they have no heritage designation… But small H heritage, they definitely have heritage value and significance to various communities and groups for various reasons in Canada, in the province, in Prince Edward County.”

Those three lighthouses had been nominated for designation under the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act, but the environment minister did not select them before the May 29 cutoff date.

Today, lighthouses are, for the most part, obsolete for practical use. Many of them are remote, where only commercial boaters travel, and those boats have computational navigation systems on board that do the job a lighthouse once did and more.

Seguin recognizes this, but says that doesn’t mean they should be abandoned.

“Like many structures from the past that are still standing, lighthouses are a vestige of our past,” he says. “Today lighthouses are still essential for shedding light on our past. And those are some of the only tangible remnants of our past that really allow us to get a glimpse of that important part of our history that was really essential for the development of our country.”