MARQUETTE — “I think the keepers of lighthouses should be dismissed for small degrees of remissness because of the calamities which even these produce …” President Thomas Jefferson, 1806.

Samuel L. Barney was one of a handful of pioneer residents of Marquette County. He was well known and highly regarded for the public trusts he held including 13 years as keeper of the Marquette County Poor Farm. He also served as a lighthouse-keeper and was awarded the honorary appellation of “captain.”

On a clear, warm July day in 1847, the seventeen-year-old Samuel arrived on the shores of what would later be known as Iron Bay with his father, Ariel, who had been hired by the Jackson Iron Company to construct a forge deep in the forest on the Carp River, near Eagle Mills.

In 1849 he returned to his home state, Ohio, to survey for a railroad. The next year, however, at his father’s request, he was back with his 16-year-old bride, Anna Eliza Colwell.

In the meantime, his father had become Marquette’s first Justice of the Peace. Shortly after, Samuel was appointed the village’s first Constable and had the distinction of arresting the town’s first murderer.

Anna Eliza was interviewed when she was in her eighties, and she remembered: “There were no saloons in Marquette at the time. The only way a man got full [drunk] was when a boat came in. A boat came in and somebody got a bottle, and my husband was a constable. There was no lighthouse then and it was called “Indian Point.” The fellow went there and kicked the fire out and Cadotte fixed it up and told him to let it alone and be decent. The fellow picked up [an] axe and killed Cadotte…They put him in Jackson for a little while. He was a good [man] when he didn’t drink.”

This incident is of interest because it occurred before 1853, when the first lighthouse, a wooden structure, was built on Indian Point.

A light signal, an open fire of some kind, was already being kept on the point and Cadotte may have been the first lightkeeper. Such beacons have a storied history, going back as far as the Ancient Greek Dark Ages (1200-800 BCE).

“So to night-wandering sailors pale with fear

Wide over the watery waste a light appears

Which on the far seen mountain blazing high

Streams from lonely watch tower to the sky.

Homer, Iliad

Samuel Barney’s first appointment was at the Grand Island Range Lights in Munising, a position he held from September 1869 to May 1873. He spent the rest of the 1873 shipping season at the isolated Granite Island Lighthouse, assisted by Albert, his young adult son.

It was not considered to be a plum job. The light had been first lit in 1868, and already Barney was its eighth keeper: one had drowned, one transferred, one was fired, and four resigned. That fall he also resigned to take the keeper position in Marquette.

In 1866 a new brick lighthouse replaced the original wooden 1853 building.

In addition, a fog signal and landing had been built and a breakwater made of stone filled wooden cribs with decking, was being completed. It ran 2,000′ out into the bay, and at its end was a light tower. In the evening and at dawn a keeper trekked out to it to light or extinguish the exposed beacon.

Later, an elevated catwalk, open but supported by solid cross timbers, led out to the tower. Still, it is easy to imagine how challenging the duty could become during rough weather.

By the time Barney took over the Marquette light in late October 1873, 20 years after it was first lit, he was again the eighth keeper. He was also the first to be given an assistant keeper. This was a much better post than Granite Island.

But of its previous keepers, three had resigned and three been fired, while the circumstances surrounding the departure of its first keeper, in 1857, are unknown.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Next week’s article will relate the experiences of Samuel Barney and other early lightkeepers in Marquette.