Epoxy

Presque Isle County

Presque Isle County, Michigan, USA

Also known as Grand Lake, Presque Isle Harbor, Presque Isle County, North Point

The man who designed the tall lighthouse here had spent the previous decade at war.

Orlando Poe was Sherman's chief engineer through the March to the Sea. In 1870 he took over as chief engineer for the Upper Great Lakes lighthouse district and drew up nine towers along these shores. The one at Presque Isle is the only Poe light on Lake Huron. It stands 113 feet with 130 steps inside it, and it remains the tallest lighthouse tower on the Great Lakes that the public can climb.

It replaced something much smaller. A mile south at the harbor mouth, a tower built in 1840 by Jeremiah Moors of Detroit had marked the entrance for three decades. Thirty feet tall, eighteen across at the base, stone and brick. By 1870 it was deteriorating and too short for the traffic, and the keeper moved north to the new light.

Both towers are still standing. The name is French for almost an island, which is what the peninsula is.

Details

Feature: Coastline
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Caribbean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: April 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Presque Isle County map by Keyway

How this one was made

Walnut, and inset with a border of bare wood running the full perimeter. The dam follows the shoreline about half an inch out and squares off against that border on the outside.

Two water bodies rather than one. Lake Huron fills the top right and wraps around the peninsula, and Grand Lake sits inland on the left, long and narrow with a broken shoreline and a scatter of islands down its length. Both are dammed separately, and the peninsula between them is a long run of coast on both sides at once.

The lettering and the compass rose are handled in the negative. Neither is engraved. Both are left standing at the original surface inside the water cavity, so the flood covers them and the sanding brings the tops back as bare walnut with blue all around. That means the letters have to be cut clean at full depth, because there is no fill to tidy a ragged edge afterwards.

One colour, then, doing two jobs. The pour that makes the water also makes the text, by going around it.