There can be huge crowds Radzak says people come from as far away as the East Coast and Texas. The staff holds a ceremony called the "Muster of the Last Watch" where they ring a ship's bell for every member of the crew lost on the Fitzgerald. It is the one time visitors can enter the lamp room while the light is lit. 10, the anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that sank in Lake Superior in 1975 with the loss of its 29 crew members. It was Radzak who, in 1985, began the annual tradition of lighting the lantern on Nov. Reportedly they were so loud up close that they would knock people to their knees if they were foolish enough to walk in front of them. Using a gas-powered air compressor the horns could be heard 5 miles away. On days when they couldn't see, they sounded the foghorns. The 252 cut-glass prisms in the lens focused the light into a 7-foot beam visible for 22 miles. The keepers lit the lens with a kerosene lamp to warn ships away from the rocky shore. "But we were fortunate that they knew it would be protected by the state of Minnesota so they left it in place and we still have it here now." "Usually the Coast Guard pulls all the working apparatus out of a lighthouse when it is retired," he said. The Minnesota Historical Society took over the lighthouse after the Coast Guard decommissioned it in 1969.Īt the top of the lighthouse is what Radzak calls Split Rock's crown jewel - a huge Fresnel lens made by French glassworkers.
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