Illuminating History Oregon Lighthouse Offers Unique Nighttime Tours

The rules of the Lighthouse Service are clear, and James Hughes could be sacked for giving the forbidden tour.

Yet here he is - the much-respected first assistant keeper of the Cape Blanco Lighthouse - in full uniform, breaking the service’s cardinal rule against allowing guests in the lantern room at night.

It’s a time when a keeper’s first responsibility is caring for the flame illuminating the huge French-made glass lens that gathers the light and casts it to sea.

The light is vital because the waters off Cape Blanco - the westernmost point of the contiguous United States - are treacherous, the keeper tells his guest. He explains that fog and offshore reefs have caused a number of wrecks, including one that cost 21 lives.

“That’s the reason for this lighthouse,” says Hughes, as thick white beams from the oldest operating light in Oregon penetrate the darkness on a clear summer night. It’s 127 years since pioneers built the lighthouse high on the cape and 134 after Hughes was born on his parents’ nearby ranch.

No, the ghost of James Hughes hasn’t come back to haunt the old lighthouse where he spent so many long nights. It’s Mike Hewitt, playing the role of Hughes, who worked as an assistant keeper.

The role-playing is part of a new two-hour-plus tour that Hewitt and his wife, Theresia, are offering the public. They’re now leading small groups of visitors on nighttime visits to the lighthouse, including lengthy stops at the lantern room for a close look at the rare handmade lenses - the crown jewels of Oregon lighthouses. The Hewitts say it’s the only tour in Oregon, and perhaps in the country, that takes visitors into the lantern room of a working lighthouse at night.

For most people, the word “lens” brings to mind a small piece of polished glass, such as the lens in a pair of eyeglasses or a camera. But the cylindrical Fresnel lighthouse lenses - named for the Frenchman who invented them - are much larger and made up of hundreds of pieces of glass designed to gather light and focus it into powerful beams. The lens in the Cape Blanco lighthouse is 6 feet wide and 7 feet high.

As the lens turns around the powerful electric light inside, rainbows dance among the sparkling prisms, creating swirling lines of brilliant color and casting alternate lines of bright light and shadow on the bearded man in the uniform of a 1914 lighthouse keeper.

“This is something you don’t get in the daytime,” he says. “Now it’s dark, and your whole attention is on the lens and the light and the fact that it is shining.”

The whole idea of the night tours, the Hewitts say, is to give visitors the feel of what it was like during the keepers’ long and lonely nighttime shifts.

As Mike Hewitt steps back into the Hughes role, he describes the storms. How a few years back (from 1914) some keepers down in the watch room heard the sound of breaking glass above and ran up iron stairs to the lantern room to find a rock “the size of your fist” on the floor.

“It had come through the pane behind your back and broke the window,” he says. “It was blowin’ at hurricane strength and that rock must have come over the ledge and through the window to break that glass. That night it blew part of the fence down, shingles off the house, and many shingles off the barn. It was quite a storm.”

He tells of how he and some of the other keepers were working in the garden when lightning hit the top of the lighthouse, snapping a cable leading from the lightning rod to the ground and jumping inside the lighthouse to travel down the metal staircase, leaving burn marks as the electricity moved from step to step.

The evening tour includes stories gleaned from the Hewitt’s research about the early days of the lighthouse, how building materials were unloaded at Port Orford to the south and hauled by horse-drawn wagon up a primitive road.

The couple tells of the white-glove inspections by lighthouse keepers; the progression from oil lamps to kerosene to electricity; how the first big nonmoving lens was swapped for a smaller rotating one in 1936; and how the fragile lens had to be repaired because of accidental damage shortly after it was installed and because of vandalism in 1992.

Theresia Hewitt talks about what life was like for the families of the early keepers.

“You really had to be a kind of special person to live in this isolated environment,” she says. “They had all this wind, all this fog. It was never warm at all. It was really bad.”

The night lighthouse tours, authorized under a permit issued to the Hewitts by the Bureau of Land Management, began in June and are just getting organized. The $25 a person cost may increase after a marketing effort now being organized increases bookings, the Hewitts say. They are confident that lighthouse enthusiasts from across the country will be interested, even though free, much-shorter tours with volunteer guides are available during the day.

“We can only take 10 people a night,” Mike Hewitt says. “I think we’ll very shortly have more demand than we have space available.”

Each tour ends the same way. The Hewitts take their guests out into the darkness to stand at the base of the lighthouse, listen to the ever-present wind and look skyward to see the lighthouse’s eight white beams rotating overhead in the night sky.

“Just put your back to the tower and look up,” Theresia Hewitt says. “This is the sight most people never get to see.”