Old Mission Point Lighthouse
— a small white schoolhouse halfway to the pole.
Not only on a wall.
Old Mission 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 wooden schoolhouse-style lighthouse at the end of the eighteen-mile peninsula that splits Grand Traverse Bay. The tower was lit in 1870 and sits on the forty-fifth parallel, halfway between the equator and the North Pole, a fact marked on a small sign in the sand. The light is small, the building is white, and the beach in front of it runs out a long way before the bay gets deep enough to swim. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Mission Point Light, locally called Old Mission Point Lighthouse, stands at the northern tip of Old Mission Peninsula on Grand Traverse Bay. The wooden tower and integrated keeper's dwelling were completed in 1870 and lit that September. The point itself sits almost exactly on the forty-fifth parallel of north latitude, the halfway line between the equator and the North Pole, which is the small piece of trivia local guidebooks lead with. The lighthouse and the surrounding land are managed by Peninsula Township as Mission Point Park.
The building is the modest schoolhouse-style lighthouse common on the smaller Great Lakes passages of the 1860s and '70s: white clapboard, square wooden tower, a small lantern room rising from the gable. The original light was a fifth-order Fresnel lens, low-power because the bay traffic was coastal rather than open-water. The station was decommissioned in 1933 when a steel skeleton tower offshore took over the navigation work. The wooden building survived because it became township property rather than being torn down for materials.
Mission Point Park is open year-round, with the lighthouse museum and the keeper's program running seasonally, generally May through October. The drive up M-37 from Traverse City is about twenty miles and ends in the small parking lot at the point. The shoreline immediately around the lighthouse is shallow sand, good for wading, with the bay floor staying knee-deep a long way out. Trails behind the building loop through second-growth woods toward the East Arm of Grand Traverse Bay.
