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Because so much can be seen in this one image, this is by far one of our favorite photographs of a buoy dock at any Lighthouse Depot. This photo was taken in April of 1934 on the buoy dock of the 11th District Lighthouse Depot in Detroit, Michigan.
The huge gas light buoys, all freshly painted and refurbished, would soon be bobbing like corks on the Great Lakes and rivers between Detroit and Duluth, Minnesota, some 800 miles away. They were simply waiting for the ice to clear so that the tenders, whose booms, masts, and smokestacks can be seen in the distance, could start the job of loading them onto to the tenders and then delivering and putting them in place at their assigned locations. It wouldn’t be long before the 1934 Pontiac automobile would no longer have to squirm and wriggle about on the Lighthouse Depot dock. However, it almost appears that the automobile was placed where it was for a staged photograph for public relations, something that many lighthouse superintendents and depot keepers were good at. To the far right in this photo can be seen the lantern mast of what appears to be a lightship. As the Depot employees drove home from work they might have heard on the radio that the world’s largest ever recorded surface wind speed of 231 miles per hour was recorded that day on the summit of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington.
This story appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2014 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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