Lighthouse living

A full house of curious people came out to hear Linda and Gene Fennell talk about their month-long experience as lighthouse keepers.
The presentation, entitled “There and Back Again” took place at Custer Senior Center May 20.
The Fennells began their road trip west from Custer to Battery Point Lighthouse in northern California stopping in Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Craters of the Moon National Monument  and Crater Lake.
It was not Linda’s first trip to the lighthouse; she visited her aunt and uncle  who lived in the area in the 1960s.
“The lighthouse was open and we got a tour and we went out and I said to my sister in law, ‘I would love to work there.’ And my sister in law said ‘well you can, those people are from Belle Fourche,’” Linda said.
Linda got an application for the job but had to wait until Gene retired to get a month-long window for the opportunity. That came in September 2024 and off the Fennells went.
Battery Point Lighthouse is still active and used as a navigation aid. It is also a Del Norte County historic preservation project; a museum people can come and visit, with a caveat: the lighthouse is only accessible during low tide.
“It was always an island,” Gene says about the three-acre site that he and Linda lived on.
Built in 1856, the walkway over used to be all rocks. Now a concrete path brings you over. However it is still only possible to make the trek at just the right time.
“We ended up living our life by the tides,” Gene said, with Linda saying it was dangerous to make the trek from the mainland to the island at other times. That meant any visitors had to be off the island before the tide shifted, otherwise they would be there overnight.
While the Fennells used a phone app to ascertain the low tide window, most  visitors didn’t realize the tide  was even an issue.
Because of the tides Linda and Gene’s work schedule was never the same. And it was never dull. Nine or 10 people could be given a tour at one time.
All the September visitors were able to get the full lighthouse experience, which meant going up a spiral staircase to a ladder and crawling through an 18-inch by two-foot hole to get to the actual lighthouse light.
“We got everybody through it no matter how big they were,” Linda said  of getting people to the light.
The light is now a Double Drumm Lens with wrapped around prisms. Every lighthouse has a unique  lighthouse “signature,”  which is how often the light flashes. Battery Points’ comes on every 26.5 seconds. It also  projects 14 miles.
The tours kept Linda and Gene quite busy. They estimate they ran 110 people  through in two hours per day for tours.
“One time we didn’t get off the island for 12 days,” Linda said, because they were giving so many tours.
The tours consisted of not just seeing the light but also the lightkeeper house and island grounds.
The Cape Cod style lighthouse, meaning the  tower comes right out of the building, cost $15,000 to build and was designed with two-foot thick granite walls.  An outhouse, poised  near the edge of the sea, was the only “toilet” on the property until modern amenities were added. A kitchen was added in 1879.
In the 1920s the Coast Guard added onto it as well creating the present day laundry room.
Ship captains would be entertained in the parlor. Today’s lighthouse now has two bedrooms, updated lighting and  indoor plumbing.
As  the lighthouse keepers moved, they took their possessions with them.
The first lighthouse keeper  was Theophilus Magruder’s, who was paid  $1,000/year to man the light. Magruder artifacts, including crocheted hair art pieces, explain the hobbies he was into.
Lightkeeper John H. Jeffrey  stayed the longest, manning the island with his wife and children for 40 years.
Lore from the island suggests a possible haunting, with two rocking chairs often kept in the basement so keepers didn’t have to hear them rock.
Besides giving tours, Linda and Gene kept very busy cleaning windows, repairing the fuel house and rebuilding structural lookouts destroyed by termites.
But their main job was visiting with people.
“That’s one of the great things, all of the people  you meet,” Gene says  about his experience on the island.
The couple hosted many visitors for sunsets and met people from all over the world, including old friends they hadn’t seen for 40 years. They even played an unexpected part in a marriage proposal.
Linda and Gene’s other frequent visitors were two seagulls they nicknamed  Silly Sally and Scuttle.
The Fennells are looking forward to being lightkeepers once again and plan to return back to Battery Point in December of this year.