The Pacific Coast, stretching some 1,300 miles from Mexico’s border with California up to the Canadian border, was a dark and daunting line to mariners in the 1800s. The earth’s geology had given the West Coast a dramatically different contour from the Atlantic Coast: jagged, irregular, high cliffs, and, worse, a sudden, steep drop off the continental shelf that allowed prevailing winds from the west to drive waves onto the shore with incredible speed and power.
In 1848, the U.S. Congress created the Oregon Territory, and with the same act, appropriated funds for the U.S. Light House Establishment to construct the first two lights on the far northwest coast: the first at Cape Disappointment, and the second on New Dungeness spit, south of the new busy port of Nootka, on Vancouver Island. Thus began the history of lighthouses on the West Coast of the United States. I will present below, in short, fourteen of them.
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