Every Photograph of the Minnesota Point Lighthouse

These three photographs of the Minnesota Point Lighthouse show slightly different perspectives.

For all but 19 years of its existence, the Minnesota Point Lighthouse structure has stood as ruins. The dilapidated tower has been photographed innumerable times, and anyone could visit it today and shoot as many pictures as desired. But very few photos seem to exist of it as a functioning lighthouse. The prevailing theory is that there are only four.

The premiere issue of Unsalted magazine recently reported on the state of the lighthouse ruins for its cover story. While gathering historical details, the publication’s research group searched for photos of the structure as a functioning lighthouse and found surprisingly few. There wasn’t space in the magazine to focus on all the images, but space on the internet is infinite, so below are all four images and what we think we know about them.

Are there more photos hiding in private collections and in dusty historical organization files? Possibly. And perhaps this post will help shake them out.

This image from the Minnesota Historical Society might be the oldest photo of the Minnesota Point Lighthouse. It’s also perhaps the only photo of the lighthouse from the shipping entry; every other photo is from the harbor. The society’s website dates the image as 1899, but that is absolutely incorrect. Due to shifting sands, the shipping entry had moved a quarter of a mile away from the lighthouse by 1878.

St. Paul-based photographers Joel E. Whitney and Charles A. Zimmerman published a stereograph of the Minnesota Lighthouse circa 1870. The version above is a little rough, but cleaner versions of the photo used in the stereograph appear on several websites, touched up and cropped in different ways. The best version might be the one on the Lighthouse Friends website. The Minnesota Historical Society also has a somewhat cleaned-up version of the full stereograph.

The Library of Congress has one 19th century photo of the lighthouse. The date of the photo and the name of the photographer are unknown, but the library attributes it to Louis P. Gallagher with the date March 24, 1934. Gallagher was likely hired by the government to create a print of the photo on that date, using a negative that at the time was about a half-century old. The library’s citation notes the photo was commissioned for the Historic American Buildings Survey. This image was used to create an illustration for a color postcard of the lighthouse titled “The Old Standby.”

This photo from the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center Museum’s collection has turned up various places on the internet over the years in various forms, including a watercolor-painted version.

And that’s it. After a year of internet searches and poking through boxes of historic photos and negatives, it seems these are the only photos of the Minnesota Point Lighthouse before its decommissioning on Aug. 6, 1885, which relegated it to its role as a historic ruin.

But you are invited to dig out your great grandparents’ photo albums and prove this theory wrong.