Toledo Lighthouse Festival back this weekend after one-year pandemic hiatus
Sep. 9—The 17th Toledo Lighthouse Waterfront Festival this weekend at Maumee Bay State Park is an event that aims to stimulate interest in preserving one of western Lake Erie's most historic landmarks.
Visiting the Toledo Harbor Lighthouse itself involves a $35 boat ride, but there also will be shoreside events for landlubbers.
Weather permitting, the boat rides from the park will take lighthouse-lookers on a five-mile trip out to the building next to the Toledo Harbor Channel, where they can see new second-floor windows and shutters installed just this year. Reservations may be made by sending a text to 419-367-1691 or an email to sandylakeerie@aol.com.
Events at Maumee Bay itself will be free of charge, although organizers said they will welcome $5 donations.
The festival, which is from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, will feature live music, food trucks, arts and crafts, a silent auction, gift cards, and more. The closing act, as has happened in the past, will be a performance by a steel drum troupe from the Toledo School for the Arts.
Many of the activities will take place along the shores of the park's inland pond.
Sandy Bihn, president of Toledo Harbor Lighthouse Preservation Society, the 400-member group behind the festival, said there's a spot along the beach that offers great views of Lake Erie, the inland pond, and the lighthouse on the horizon.
"You feel the presence of the waterfront," she said.
About $2.5 million of work remains for new plumbing, electricity, and other costs associated with rehabbing the 4,000-square-foot lighthouse, which was built in 1904 and was last staffed in 1966.
The society's goal is to restore it enough so four to five people can live out there at a time between May and October of each year. The plan is to have them give tours and serve as "Keepers" for other visitors.
Unlike the shoreside Marblehead Lighthouse, the Toledo Harbor Light is out in the lake and accessible only by boat.
"It's a really cool lighthouse," Ms. Bihn said. "One of the greatest tourist attractions in Ohio is the Marblehead Lighthouse. [The Toledo lighthouse] will be a major, major tourist attraction."
Ms. Bihn, a former Oregon city administrator and city council member, founded the Lake Erie Waterkeeper environmental group, which for years has tracked manure and other sources of nutrients that feed toxic algae in western Lake Erie.
Restoring the local lighthouse, she said, is a project that could give the Toledo area "a real positive image" to help counter the negative publicity the region has gotten over the years because of the algal blooms, which have chronically reappeared almost every summer since 1995.
"I think it's a gem waiting to be tapped," Ms. Bihn said.
Toledo Harbor Lighthouse was built to replace an 1837-vintage lighthouse on Turtle Island, near the Maumee River's mouth. The Coast Guard's decision to close it occurred during an era when it and many others were automated, while still more were replaced with simpler light towers and abandoned, if not torn down.
The Toledo Harbor Lighthouse Preservation Society, founded in 2004 and now with about 500 members, wants to reopen it to the public as a tourist destination.
Members have said they believe there is a niche tourist demographic that seeks out lighthouse tours. This one, they believe, would have special appeal for boaters.
The nonprofit society has owned the lighthouse since buying it for $1 on April 25, 2007, from the U.S. Department of Interior. That year, the group won the Excellence Preservation Award from the Landmarks Preservation Council.
Restoration began in earnest on Aug. 18, 2020, when new windows and shutters were installed on the first floor. The lighthouse's huge steel doors were refurbished, and brickwork was done.
The cost of that initial work was more than $700,000, paid for through a combination of grants and private contributions.
While no longer staffed, Toledo Harbor Lighthouse is still a working aid to navigation, with a light visible for 13 nautical miles and a foghorn. The Coast Guard describes the lighthouse as a dark tower on buff Romanesque dwelling architecture.
Tongue-in-cheek rumors circulated over the years that the lighthouse was haunted.
But those quips are largely related to the sight of a clothed "sailor" — a mannequin with a blonde wig and blue shirt that was placed next to the third floor's southwest window in 1986 to help ward off vandals. The window was called "Sarah's Window."
The origin of the mannequin's name is unknown, but it became a tradition for first-time Coast Guard visitors to sign her shirt — until she was stolen.
In 2009, the lighthouse society replaced the mannequin with a clothed stick figure with an Air Force uniform shirt and named him Frank after the shirt's former owner, Frank Bihn — Sandy Bihn's husband, and another society member working to restore the lighthouse.
"Our plan is to replace Frank with another Sarah once the lighthouse is restored, so she will once again keep watch from her window," Mr. Bihn said in an interview last October.
"This one is special to me because it's in a lake," Mr. Bihn said back then.
First Published September 9, 2021, 11:56am
