Cana Island Lighthouse, Wisconsin, United States

4Howard L 5:00 PM Oct 23, 2021

A fun and unique outing to a lighthouse
The tractor-drawn wagon ride to see this lighthouse is what makes it a somewhat unique experience. You have to take a short but fun and bumpy ride across a shallow channel to get to Cana Island. Once there, you'll see the usual grounds and artifacts, and you can tour the keeper's home. No tower climbing during our October visit though as they were short-staffed as during this Covid impacted tourist season. $10 pp for the wagon ride and lighthouse visit whether there is tower climbing or not.

4snochasr 5:00 PM Oct 17, 2021

Rides like a haywagon
I don't know that the lighthouse itself is such a big attraction. We have seen lighthouses before and this one is not that big, but the big attraction here is the fact that you get to take a hay wagon ride, pulled by a tractor across the narrow channel out to the Island. It is a very rough and rocky ride. The tractor driver gives a little spiel about the Fresnel lens used in this lighthouse to concentrate the light 18 miles out to sea. He says what a genius (young) Mr. Fresnel was. That is funny, because of my background in lighting, I know all about Fresnel lenses. We use them in all of our streetlights. I even put one on my camera once to create a telephoto flash. The problem was, if you got your hands up behind it, in the sunshine, you instantly burned your fingers. One noticeable thing about this lighthouse is that the Coast Guard became concerned about its stone structure way back when, so the entire thing was clad in steel. The tower itself is closed to visitors, and the light was long ago converted to electricity and automated. You can get in and take a picture of the spiral staircase, if you know how. We took our time walking through the restored lighthouse keeper’s quarters, the assistant keeper’s quarters, the fuel shed, workshop, two-hole privy that used buckets because you could not dig a hole in the hard rock, and the large rock wall to keep the large waves from the Bay at bay :-). There was also a storyteller there, who told about the lighthouse and lighthouse keepers’ long history. Only two sailors died and five ships were lost in 170 years, and only 3 of those went down from hitting the shoals. But when we came back he was telling the story about the only pirate ever charged with piracy on the Great Lakes. It turns out his connection to the story was that this pirate was buried by a local Methodist minister and that the storyteller himself was a Methodist minister who served with the guy that did the funeral back in 1979. On the ride back we notice the life preservers hung on the side of the wagon—NOT what you usually see on a hay wagon. And we remember the old expression from back on the farm, that something rides like a hay wagon. Well, this is a hay wagon.