<p>Located in “the land of cheese, trees, and ocean breeze,” Cape Meares Lighthouse sits on the Oregon Coast at the northern end of the beautiful, twenty-mile-long Three Capes Scenic Loop.
</p><p>Cape Meares Lighthouse in 1955 Cape Meares was originally named Cape Lookout by explorer Captain John Meares in 1788, but nautical charts produced in 1850 and 1853 mistakenly put the name on another cape, ten miles to the south. By the time the mistake was realized, Cape Lookout was being widely used by mariners for the southern cape. George Davidson, an officer with the Coast Survey, decided it would be easier to rename the original Cape Lookout than correct the maps, and in 1857 he renamed it Cape Meares.
</p><p>Perhaps because of this confusion, rumors have persisted over the years that the lighthouse was originally intended for Cape Lookout and was mistakenly built on Cape Meares. Surveys of both capes submitted in 1886, clearly show that there was no mistake. In them, J.S. Polhemus wrote, “Cape Meares...affords nearly as good a site [as Cape Lookout] as far as the view from the sea is concerned, and being lower gives a better situation of light with reference to fogs; and besides would be much easier of construction on account of its accessibility from Tillamook Bay.”
</p><p>In January 1886, Congress approved $60,000 for construction of Cape Meares Lighthouse, and bids for building the light station were opened on August 30, 1888. Three separate contracts were awarded for the work: Richard Leaman of Portland was awarded a $26,000 for erecting two frame keeper’s dwellings, two brick oil houses, a barn, and cistern, and for draining and grading the grounds. Willamette Iron Work of Portland was given a $7,800 contact for supply the metalwork for the tower, and Charles B. Duhrkoop of Seattle received a $2,900 contract for erecting the tower.
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The dwellings and various outbuildings were finished on November 28, 1889, and the tower, with lens in place, was completed on December 23, 1889. The first-order, Fresnel lens, made in France by the Henry-Lepaute firm, was shipped around Cape Horn to Cape Meares, where a hand-operated crane made from local spruce trees was used to lift the crates containing the prisms of the one-ton lens up the 200 foot cliff to the tower. Made of sheet iron lined with bricks, the octagonal tower is the only one of its kind on the Oregon Coast and sits on a ledge cut from solid rock.
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.flickr.com/people/27190564@N02">Kirt Edblom</a> from Kihei, Hi, United States
CC BY-SA 2.0
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