Lighthouses of Humboldt County
Lighthouses of Humboldt County
By Julie Clark. The impenetrable coast of Humboldt County has been a historic navigational conundrum for sea captains since the 16th century. The Humboldt bar crossing, the lack of safe harbors, the storms, the unpredictable seas, and the rocky shores caused tragic shipwrecks, drownings, and maritime disasters. Beginning in 1850, the Department of the Treasury funded the construction of eleven lighthouses in California, including the Humboldt Harbor Lighthouse. Others were built as the population increased, causing a reliance on passenger schooners and freight vessels. Read their story in this book!
Author Julie Clark works for the Bureau of Land Management as a park ranger and is also the author of Falk: Company Lumber Town of the American West.
Like all the books in the Arcadia series, it is illustrated with some 200 historic photographs accompanied by deeply informative captions. Together they detail our coastal history from its rocky, foggy beginnings to the present. They cover the perils and personalities of early seafaring, the numerous wrecks along our treacherous shores, the siting and building of lighthouses and their equipping, and the lonely lives of the families that staffed them. It also touches on other aspects of coastal safety such as the wartime Coast Guard patrols.
For a community whose development was initially based on maritime transportation, this subject is historically vital and continues to be so now that the old lighthouses are now largely tourist attractions or the goal of a Sunday trek to the ruins of the Punta Gorda lighthouse, an open house at the Trinidad light or the memories of the hippy colony at Lighthouse Ranch.
Altogether, this is an enlightening look at Humboldt's coastal history.