The Marquette Maritime Museum & Lighthouse in Marquette Michigan

Just a moment's drive away from Marquette Michigan's Historic Downtown Shopping District, along Lakeshore Boulevard sits a hipped-roof Richardsonian Romanesque style structure made of locally quarried stone. It features rounded arch windows that capture the rising sun and is adorned with a parapeted front gable. This building was designed by architect Demetrius Frederick Charltonthe and makes home to the Marquette Maritime Museum.

The Marquette Maritime Museums' inception came shortly after 1980 when the building once functioned as the old city water works. Now the building welcomes over 10,000 visitors each year, 40% of which are school children where it serves as a historical learning tool. Another 20% of the documented visitors came from other states, in fact there are only two states in which there were no guest visitors from.

The Marquette Maritime Museum has only two full-time employee staff members and the vast majority of staff that caters to the many visitors during the peak summer months are from civic-minded volunteers. Even all 12 Board of Directors roll-up their sleeves to get the necessary preparations complete for the opening each summer.

The Museum has been graced with fortune with the finds of a preeminent collection of lighthouse lenses seen anywhere in the Great Lakes region and it could possible be ranked at best in the United States.

The maritime museum holds bragging rights to a 2nd, 3rd and 4th order of classical Fresnel lenses in any one same exhibit museum of its kind concurrently, which is almost certainly proof of said bragging rights for the Marquette Maritime Museum.

If you were to place their DB24 airport beacon at one end of the display and a modern acrylic systems used today at the other you would be able to see the evolution of lighthouse illuminating systems right before your very eye's. The Marquette Maritime Museum is presently seeking a Winslow Lewis lamp that would complete said collection.

Some of the most notable lens that can be listed would be that of the one built in Paris in 1880, a Fresnel 2nd order with a classical 12 bulls eye. Another would be the one on loan from the Big Bay Bed and Breakfast 25 miles northwest of Marquette that when in operation served as another link in the lighted chain that guided vessels at times, in the unforgiving icy waters of Lake Superior. This particular lens stands at 12 feet tall with a minimum range of 18 miles.

The Marquette Maritime Museum also features a forth order Fresnel lens that was installed in 1886 and then refitted with another in 1908 where it stood until 1986 before it was decommissioned. It's non-rotating feature is a characteristic of most colored and or blinking beacons. One of the museum's more modern lens which is gaining in popularity in the maritime illumination is that of the acrylic lens that is fitted with automatic bulb changers and are impervious to the severe weather the Lake Superior area can conjures up.

Marquette Maritime Museum adds an even more interesting fact by that it sits adjacent to the newly built, all modern, US Coast Guard Station on the very same grounds.

The Marquette Maritime Museum is just one of our many best kept secrets the area has to offer and certainly will not be difficult to spot should you visit the area. Admission prices are: Adults: Museum Only or Lighthouse; $4,
Both Museum and Lighthouse; $7, Children 12 and Under; Museum Only or Lighthouse; $3, Both Museum and Lighthouse; $5

Source: Marquette Maritime Museum & Lighthouse