The North Manitou “Crib” Lighthouse gets a makeover
Photos by Mae Stier
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Dan Oginsky remembers the first night he spent on the North Manitou Shoal Light Station, commonly known in Leelanau County as “the Crib.” It was July 2019, and he and fellow Light Keeper Dave McWilliam were rustic camping while sleeping on cots inside the lighthouse. Their companions were cobwebs, spiders, and a layer of “guano” bird poop left on the outside deck by the passing cormorant birds.
Dan and Dave cooked burgers on a grill they brought from the mainland and hauled off the boat using a crane on the lighthouse’s lower deck. After a day of hard work repainting the Coast Guard insignia on the concrete wall above the water line, they enjoyed what Dan called “the best sunset of all time.” During a Facebook Live call with his wife, Anna, Dan admitted that he was crying.
“I felt a very strong spiritual presence. It was pure energy,” he said. “My dream was to get the restoration project done, grab a chair, sit on the deck and listen to Pearl Jam’s ‘Yellow Ledbetter’ while the sun set over South Manitou Island to the west.”
At three o’clock in the morning, Dan woke up, climbed the stairs to the top of the lighthouse and stood outside on the third deck while the wind howled off Lake Michigan. He swore he felt the tower swaying.
Upon returning to his cot in the second level, he shone his flashlight on the ceiling above to reveal hundreds of spiders crawling above him. Dan unfurled a mosquito net — as you might on a safari — which he wore through the night. Before drifting off to sleep, Dan searched on his phone and confirmed that these arachnids weren’t poisonous, though they are industrious. Like spiders found on skyscrapers, they rode the wind to reach the lighthouse, which lies four miles from Pyramid Point — the closest spot on the mainland.
All night long Dan reveled in the drone of the wind.
“I want to be out here some day when there’s a big storm going on,” he boasted. “This thing is a brick, it’s just solid.”
The lighthouse sits on a solid wood frame that was built in Frankfort, hauled here along with boulders, timbers and concrete, and sunk to the lakebed 25 feet deep to form the foundation. First planned by the Hoover administration in the 1920s, then canceled when Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, then restarted during FDR’s Depression-era public works projects, the Crib started operations in 1935. Its predecessor was a lightship that anchored here at the southern end of the shoal (a shallow area) jutting south of North Manitou Island — a perilous area where boats could easily run aground in a critical Great Lakes shipping lane. The lighthouse sits two miles from North Manitou, seven miles from South Manitou, four miles from Pyramid Point, the nearest spot on the mainland, and eight miles from Leland harbor.
For 45 years, crews of three U.S. Coast Guardsmen protected ships and sailors as they passed through the Manitou Passage. In 1980, its navigational equipment was automated and the building was shuttered, making it the last manned lighthouse in the Great Lakes to be decommissioned.
“Let’s buy a lighthouse”
In 2015, the U.S. government deemed the shoal to be “excess property” and offered it for auction the following year. That’s when the Oginskys and their friends, Dave and Sherry McWilliam, Todd and Natalie Buckley, and Jake and Suzanne Kaberle formed the nonprofit North Manitou Light Keepers and won a bid to acquire the crib.
What started as a pipedream and a half-hearted joke between Dan and Dave as they drove home to Brighton, Michigan, after a camping trip on North Manitou Island (“I love lighthouses. I’d love to own a lighthouse someday,” quipped McWilliam.) suddenly led to a real opportunity when Dan read that the North Manitou Shoal was for sale. “Holy crap, we’ve gotta buy this thing,” he texted Jake.
The friends joked back and forth about the idea. Someone shared a picture they found online of a lighthouse keeper sporting an enormous beard with a cat wrapped inside it. With each text, and each belly laugh, the idea grew more and more real.
When Dan pulled up pictures of the lighthouse and saw the condition of the exterior — its guano-covered deck and the weather-worn walls — and the interior, where paint chips hung from the ceiling like stalactites and boarded-up windows had kept out the sun for decades, he realized what rough shape the building was in. “It’s one thing to buy a lighthouse. It’s another to do something with it,” he thought to himself. “But there was a need to bring it back to life.”
Bidding started at $10,000, but the price quickly rose over the next few weeks as a competitor would wait until the final minutes of each 24-hour bidding cycle to raise their offer. When the price reached $70,000, the friends decided to bow out, but Dan got a text from Anna suggesting that they place one final offer. She had just visited their North Manitou Lighthouse Keepers website for the first time, seen pictures of the lighthouse and told Dan that the crib spoke to her, “Don’t give up on me.” The friends offered $73,000 and won on Sept. 27, 2016.
“I like to say we’re a bunch of dogs who caught the car, and now we’re going for a ride,” said Dan.
On their first visit to the lighthouse in 2017, Captain Jimmy Muñoz, who shuttled them on the 25-minute trip from Leland harbor in his fishing boat, The Cutter, shook his head at the thought of anyone taking over the North Manitou Shoal. His daughter had recently completed a school report about the crib’s condition and its infestation of spiders, cobwebs and guano.
One hundred yards before they reached the lighthouse, Dan could already smell the bird feces on the deck. “There was like two inches of bird guano. You could put a foot in it and your boot would sink. There was a dead cormorant embossed in the guano. It was gross.”
Scraping the bird poop off the deck was one of their first tasks. Once inside, they removed boards from the windows to let the sun penetrate the lighthouse, which had moldered in pitch blackness for decades, and found a haunting scene of walls of spiderwebs. During those early trips, the crew ultimately carried 160 bags of garbage back to the mainland.
“It’s awful. There’s no reason why anyone should want that thing,” Dan remembers Captain Jimmy telling the new owners. “And yet, here we are.”
“What I find so compelling is that it sits right here in one of America’s most beautiful places, right here in the Manitou Passage between the islands and the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Right here, and it’s rusting and decaying, and it needs help.”
“Then there’s the part about loving and protecting the Great Lakes and telling history. The other part that really came through, which we didn’t understand at first, was honoring the legacy of the Coast Guard. All those pieces came together.”
Public tours within five years
In 2017 the North Manitou Light Keepers launched the first phase of their work, which included cleaning the outside of the lighthouse and removing lead-based paint, asbestos and bird excrement, stabilizing and weatherproofing the structure,re-painting the exterior of the lighthouse, repairing damaged metalwork, conducting an underwater evaluation of the structure and surrounding bottomlands, and replacing glass panes and painting the lantern house.
Federal EPA regulations required that they haul all waste back to the mainland so none of it ended up in Lake Michigan. Their contractor built scaffolding around the lighthouse to sandblast the surface down to the metal and catch every fleck of paint, which was collected and taken back to Leland, before priming and adding three new coats.
“It was a monumental and expensive job just to paint this thing,” said Dave. “There’s no electricity, no toilet, and no drinking water out here. The sandblasting and painting alone cost $225,000.”
The group launched an ambitious capital “campaign for the crib” to raise funds, restore the lighthouse, and make it available for public tours by July 4, 2021—a goal they accomplished with two weeks to spare. The capital campaign attracted 150 new members (each of whom contributing $25 or more) and garnered $650,000, coupled with $100,000 in grants. Supporters sponsored 22 rectangular original windows inside, each of which cost $5,000 to be restored.
On June 19, the Light Keepers led four supporters of the project on their first official tour of the crib. The next tour went on July 3, and 10 more followed after that, mostly on Saturdays through the summer. Dan Oginsky estimates they took approximately 50 people to the lighthouse in 2021.
“The best part was to see the joy people felt,” Dan said. “Some didn’t talk much because they were soaking in the moment, looking out at the islands, looking back at the dunes, seeing freighters go by. They were blown away by the experience.”
Supporters who sponsored a window were encouraged to hang a temporary sign next to “their” window. Permanent plaques will ultimately replace those signs.
Dan remembers that one trip included a few 60-somethings who quickly found folding chairs in the lighthouse and took them onto the deck to lounge in them as they faced the Manitou Passage.
“I felt like these guys got it. They knew exactly what to do. Pull out those chairs and enjoy the moment.”
Another trip included a supporter who had sponsored one of the lighthouse’s windows, together with her daughter and grandchildren. Dan led them to the lantern house and took photos of them with his aerial drone.
“It was amazing to see three generations of one family, with huge smiles on their faces and flexing their muscles, at the top of a lighthouse out in Lake Michigan.”
Another visitor, Don Schank, a Floridian who grew up on Little Glen Lake, has constructed mini replicas of the North Manitou Lighthouse — one for the Light Keepers and one for the Leelanau Historical Society Museum in Leland. Schank is currently building a replica of the crib’s radio room.
When the owners are on the Crib and the Mishe Mokwa goes by ferrying passengers to the Manitou Islands, they raise the Stars and Stripes and their North Manitou Light Keepers flag up the flagpole.
All trips to the lighthouse leave Leland harbor on Jimmy Muñoz’s charter fishing boat. Each trip lasts about two to three hours and includes 60-90 minutes on the lighthouse itself, which visitors access by climbing 20 rungs up a 20-foot vertical ladder to the lighthouse deck. Each visitor wears a harness and is hooked to a crane for support, just in case they fall backwards. The tour offers a narrative description of the crib’s history and a trip to the second deck and the lantern house, which sits 60 feet above the water level and offers breath-taking views of Lake Michigan, the islands and the shoreline.
But tours don’t happen if the lake is too choppy. The Light Keepers give Captain Jimmy 100% discretion on evaluating wave conditions. To access the lighthouse, he faces the challenge of holding the boat next to the ladder. One of the owners climbs up first to get the winch—while usually eating a few cobwebs in the process—and attaches it to the crane on the deck, so it can hook to a visitor’s safety harness.
“The climb is not that hard, but you have to be deliberate,” said Dan. “You need upper body strength and take one step at a time.”
Light Keepers Dan, Dave, and Jake invited photographer Mae Stier and me, as well as Bryan Lijewski, an architect specialist with the State Historic Preservation Office, to join them on Nov. 4, their last trip to the crib before grabbing propane and gas canisters, a few odds and ends, and closing it down for the winter. It was a cold, beautiful morning in Leelanau County. A light snow had dusted the treetops and fields around Lake Leelanau with a layer of powdered sugar. An inch of frost covered the floor of Captain Jimmy’s boat — a first for the Light Keepers. But a mid-morning sun warmed us as it peaked over Pyramid Point and cast a glow of light down her dune face that looked like butter melting over mashed potatoes. It was a perfect day to explore the Manitou Passage.
A pool table, a motorcycle, a cocker spaniel, and a lawnmower
A highlight of the lighthouse tour was hearing Dan and Dave’s animated stories about the Coast Guardsmen who lived here — three at a time, with a fourth one rotating onto the crib every three weeks. Some still live in northern Michigan and have visited the lighthouse with its new owners.
“There are all kinds of funny stories,” said Dan. “We heard a lot about them ‘passing the time.’ Their job was to keep it working and to monitor and clean things. It’s an exciting, great location to be. But it could also get a little cumbersome to be out here for three weeks at a time.”
A cocker spaniel named Daisy lived here with the Coast Guardsmen in the 1970s. They had a billiard table in the basement and a motorcycle they’d ride around the deck. There was a lawnmower they’d push around the main deck to play a practical joke on boaters as they sailed by.
“The biggest story we heard was people coming back to shore saying, ‘I went to drink with the Coast Guard on Saturday night!’”
The crew got along most of the time, but the Light Keepers heard one story from retired Coast Guardsman Coby Thenikl, who was stationed here from 1976-1978 and lives today in Lake Ann, about how he got shot in the arm by one of his mates. For reasons that are unclear, Coby had a loaded handgun sitting on his bed. His buddy walked into the room, picked up the weapon which he assumed was empty, pointed and shot Coby through the arm. The wounded Coast Guardsman was airlifted to Munson Hospital in Traverse City and recovered from the accident. Two years ago, Coby visited the lighthouse and grew animated when he showed them the pockmark where the bullet hit the wall after leaving his body.
When the Coast Guard mothballed the lighthouse in 1980, they removed the billiard table and stripped the place of artifacts and hauled them back to the mainland. Captain Jimmy told the owners that the pool table had lived for a time in a family member’s basement, where it became a table to store things and a surface for the Muñoz kids to wax their snowboards. Dan began poking around Leland and found the pool table in Malcomb Chatfield’s Main Street Gallery.
“We had heard that it was in some gallery in Leland,” said Dan. “We bought a house in town so we’d have somewhere to stay. Dave and I walked into the place next door and there was this pool table sitting in the art gallery. I thought, ‘How do I get my hands on that?’ I wanted to put it back here in the lighthouse.”
Dave and Anna Oginsky ultimately bought Main Street Gallery from Malcomb in 2019. The joke among their fellow Light Keepers was that they bought the art gallery to get the billiard table.
“A number of artifacts from the lighthouse have ended up with older residents in Leland,” said Dave. There are porthole windows, and a beacon. Many pieces are slowly making their way back to us.”
Restoring the interior
The next chapter in the effort to restore the lighthouse includes replacing the Level 3 top deck, whose steel plates covering the deck are corroded and water damaged. Earlier this year the Light Keepers received a Michigan Lighthouse Assistance Program grant for $60,000 from the State Historical Preservation Office to replace the old decking, add rubberized material, and stop water intrusion. After that, they’ll replace the sea doors, which were welded shut at the water level. Reducing Lake Michigan levels will one day allow boats to pull up to the door and walk straight into the lighthouse basement, thereby bypassing the challenging vertical ladder.
Subsequent phases of the restoration will include installing historic cranes on the lighthouse deck, mechanical, plumbing and ventilation systems inside, and re-painting the rooms, so the ownership group can one day offer overnight and weekend stays in the crib’s living quarters, which will include four guestrooms, kitchen, a bathroom, and common area.
“Basically we have an empty shell at the moment with peeling paint on the inside,” offered Dave during our tour. “This place was basically abandoned for 40 years and deteriorating rapidly. Our objective was always to start with the exterior and work our way inside.”
The Light Keepers met their Phase 1 goal of offering tours within five years of acquiring the crib. The next phase of making it habitable to visitors for short stays depends on their ability to fundraise and attract members. They currently have approximately 150 financial supporters.
“Phase 2 is about restoring the interior of the lighthouse,” Dan said. “Right now it’s a safe place for tours, but still a rustic experience. “We want to fully restore the inside and keep it historically accurate but a comfortable place to spend time, with bedrooms, bathrooms, and running water.”
Members who support the restoration may someday be able to spend a comfortable weekend at the crib and bring little more than food and a few supplies from the mainland.
“We want to offer people the chance to spend time at this wonderful, historic lighthouse in one of America’s most beautiful places.”
Our crew on Nov. 4 was the first to leave through the open seawall as we stepped onto Captain Jimmy’s hovering boat. As we motored back toward Leland, he shared a story of approaching the lighthouse in a fog so dense that the Crib wasn’t visible until you got 100 yards away.
“It’s a clear demonstration of why this lighthouse is needed, to mark this shallow point,” he said. “You could totally get off course traveling through the Manitou Passage. Suddenly you hit this 22-foot-shallow shoal, you’re fully loaded, and your ship goes down.”
A smile spread across Dan Oginsky’s face as he looked back toward the lighthouse he and his friends owned and wouldn’t see again until the spring. It grew smaller and smaller as we neared the mainland.
“What’s amazing about the experience is you shouldn’t be able to stand there,” he said. “It’s not a feature of nature. “It’s like a platform sitting in the middle of lake. But when the sun is out, it lights up the water, you can see clear to the bottom.”
