Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse
— the keeper's tower the bridge made quiet.
Not only on a wall.
Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A castle-shouldered lighthouse in Cream City brick at the north edge of Mackinaw City, watching the straits that split Michigan's two peninsulas. Built in 1892, the light went dark in 1957 when the Mackinac Bridge opened a few hundred yards to the west and made the keeper's work obsolete overnight. The tower still stands above the breakwater, the bridge cables humming past it, ore boats sliding through the channel below. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse sits on the Lower Peninsula shoreline of the Straits of Mackinac, the five-mile-wide channel where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. The tower was completed in 1892 to guide freighters and ferries through one of the busiest crossings on the Great Lakes. When the Mackinac Bridge opened in November 1957, the bridge lights rendered the station obsolete and the Coast Guard decommissioned it the same year. The lighthouse is now operated as a museum by Mackinac State Historic Parks, the same agency that runs Colonial Michilimackinac next door.
The tower and keeper's quarters are built in a Norman castellated style, in the pale yellow Cream City brick that came south from Milwaukee on lake freighters in the 1880s. The fourth-order Fresnel lens, made in Paris by Henry-Lepaute, threw a fixed white light visible roughly sixteen miles across the straits. The brickwork was restored in the early 2000s after decades of weather off Lake Huron pitted the south wall. The crenellated parapet around the watch room is the detail that gives the building its keep-like silhouette from the water.
The museum is open seasonally, generally early May through early October, with the grounds and the small adjacent park accessible year-round. A single combination ticket from Mackinac State Historic Parks covers the lighthouse, Colonial Michilimackinac, and Historic Mill Creek a few miles east. The site is a short walk from the south end of the Mackinac Bridge and the ferry docks for Mackinac Island, which makes it the natural first or last stop on a straits day. Climbing the tower is included with admission.
