Point Fermin Lighthouse Kept Ships From Danger

Here at the southern tip of Los Angeles, on a rocky promontory jutting into the Pacific where the fog swirls and the whales spout, Los Angeles’ first lighthouse has stood guard for 128 years, marking the western boundary of the harbor.

The Point Fermin Lighthouse stands as a relic of the region’s maritime past, a place steeped in true tales of hardy lighthouse-keepers, among them several women, and of the lore of rusted and rotted remnants of sunken ships that lost their way.

Point Fermin was named by English navigator Capt. George Vancouver in honor of Father Fermin Francisco de Lasuen, colleague of Father Junipero Serra in building the California missions. The point has a lighthouse today because of 20 years of incessant lobbying by Yankee pioneer Phineas Banning, whose labors earned him the title “Father of Los Angeles Harbor.”

It wasn’t until the 1850s, during the Gold Rush, that California needed lighthouses. In the decades before, Spain had barred foreign ships from making landfall. But miners, politicians and prostitutes--not to mention a goodly amount of supplies--began being lost in a number of wrecks of ships bound for gold-crazy San Francisco.

So in 1852, Congress authorized 16 lighthouses for the Pacific Coast, among them one on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the first to be lighted in 1854; and at Point Loma in San Diego in 1855. Los Angeles’ lighthouse would not be ready for nearly 20 more years.

Land Disputes Prompt Lawsuits

Banning began buying up coastal land in anticipation of a deep-water port for landlocked Los Angeles. Some things don’t change: While Banning was busy trying to get Congress to pay for the harbor and lighthouse, disputes that would extend to 78 different lawsuits began heating up over who owned the land and what permits were needed. Disgusted, a wealthy landowner and former Los Angeles mayor named Jose Diego Sepulveda wound up selling the land to the city of Los Angeles for $35.

So the federal lighthouse ended up being built on San Pedro land, in 1874. A multiprism lens mounted in brass, the recent invention of Augustin Fresnel, was shipped from France at a cost of about $12,000. The light was fueled first by lard and coal oil, then by kerosene, and finally, more than 50 years later, by electricity.

Mary L. Smith was the first to take the $700-a-year federal job as lighthouse-keeper, in 1874. She and her sister, Helen, listened to the waves crash on the rocks below and the cry of the gulls overhead as they maintained the 2,100-candlepower oil-lamp beacon, which was visible from 13 miles, on land and sea. Apart from the moan of the foghorn that they also operated, and the occasional thump of a luckless bird attracted to the light, they at first enjoyed the tranquillity.

But after bedding down for eight long years in the Cape Cod-style, two-bedroom lighthouse with a 55-foot tower, the sisters packed up and left. The utter loneliness and isolation, along with a wind that whipped along the bluff and chilled them to the bone during storm season, finally took a toll.

They were succeeded by a procession of keepers of the flame, known as “wickies” for their skill in keeping wicks trimmed, fueled and glowing. One of the most durable was Capt. George N. Shaw, who succeeded the Smith sisters and held his position for more than two decades, living in the lighthouse with his wife and daughter.

Long-Ago Disaster Still Resonates

On a sunny afternoon in 1888, the Shaws were watching the British coal carrier Respigadera coming toward the shore when it stopped dead, goring itself on a reef. The ship was forced out to deeper waters and destroyed by dynamite. To this day, coal still washes ashore after a southeast gale.

Despite the white picket fence and garden, Shaw claimed he was unable to keep either vegetables or chickens alive on the barren headland. Vermin ate the seeds he planted. Weasels and badgers preyed on the chickens.

In April 1899, as the harbor population began to grow, Shaw had a red-letter day as 14,000 Angelenos gathered near his lighthouse. As President William F. McKinley symbolically pressed a button in the White House, railroad cars dumped the first rocks to build the San Pedro breakwater.

At the turn of the century, developer George Peck dedicated land adjoining the lighthouse property to create Point Fermin Park, less for charitable reasons than to enhance his nearby Ocean View subdivision. A park pavilion hosted Sunday dances and later roller skating and boxing events.

But when the beacon’s circular, rotating light cast its searing brightness into new residents’ privacy, it triggered an early NIMBY moment. They complained, and a half-lens was soon installed and directed out to sea.

In 1908, Angelenos flocked to the lighthouse to offer a rousing welcome to President Theodore Roosevelt’s 16 mighty warships, the “Great White Fleet” commanded by Rear Adm. Robley D. Evans, “Fighting Bob,” who steamed into the harbor on the fleet’s historic voyage around the world.

Less than a decade later, former sea captain and cowpuncher William L. Austin and his family moved into the lighthouse. His wife, Martha Avila Bunce, a descendant of a prominent Spanish land-grant family in San Luis Obispo, was a rebellious beauty who captured Austin’s heart. After they were married in 1897, Austin worked as a lighthouse-keeper at Point Arena in Mendocino and at Point Conception near Santa Barbara, two lighthouses without indoor plumbing.

Seeking a better education for their children--not to mention plumbing--the Austins moved to the Point Fermin Lighthouse in 1917. Austin was paid $750 a year, while Martha received $300 a year as his helper. Here, their eight children attended a nearby school and lived in luxury, with indoor plumbing.

The children disposed of kitchen garbage by tying a rope to one of the younger boys, who clutched an armload of trash, then lowering him about 100 feet below the cliff, where he left the trash to be engulfed by the sea. As a joke, the boy once untied himself and retied the rope to a bush, then watched as his siblings tugged vainly on the rope trying to pull him up.

On March 1, 1921, the Austin family watched as the Coast Guard towed a German U-boat out to sea off Point Fermin and a destroyer lobbed shells into it before it sank--part of Germany’s compliance with treaties that had ended World War I nearly three years earlier. The submarine’s propeller was later salvaged, melted down and poured into souvenir paperweights, according to Steve Lawson, a researcher with California Wreck Divers. But 25 pounds of unexploded TNT still remain aboard the U-boat, which now cannot be found, Lawson said.

In 1925, Martha Austin died unexpectedly; her husband died three months later, heartbroken. Maintaining her family tradition as keeper of the light, 24-year-old Thelma Austin applied for her father’s job.

“Why, the sea and this lighthouse seem to me like a holy shrine,” her letter of application stated. She got the job.

Her sister, Juana, eloped with a sailor a short time later, and several of the other siblings joined the Navy. Thelma was alone there in 1926 when the steamer David C. Meyer went aground. She radioed for help, and no lives were lost.

Electricity Ends Keeper’s Role

Three years later, the final changeover to electricity increased the beacon’s visibility to 18 miles--and signaled the end of Thelma’s job.

Her duties were reduced to a flick of a switch. She supplemented her federal income with a daytime job at a dentist’s office in Wilmington.

Within hours after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, blackout warnings along the Pacific Coast forced the Point Fermin Lighthouse to extinguish its beacon--forever, as it turned out. The Navy soon moved in and used the lighthouse as an experimental radar station. The lens and equipment were removed, and would soon surface in the window of a Malibu real estate salesman who to this day refuses to give them up.

After the war, the lighthouse stood useless. The U.S. Coast Guard instead mounted a utilitarian airport-style beacon on a plain pole several yards away. The beacon was cheap, efficient, oh so governmental--and devoid of romance. In 1948, Los Angeles regained possession of the lighthouse and turned it into a residence for a park maintenance supervisor.

The nationally designated historic landmark was restored in the early 1970s in time for its 100th birthday.

It is the one-acre centerpiece, owned by the Coast Guard, of Point Fermin Park, which is maintained by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.

Martha Austin McKinzie, a schoolteacher and granddaughter of the former lighthouse-keepers, is a member of the Point Fermin Lighthouse Society, a citizens’ group spearheading a project to turn the empty lighthouse into a living-history museum. At present, the grounds are open to the public but the interior is not.

Although the impressive beam that once swept the land and cast a glow for miles in all directions is gone, the lonely outpost can still evoke powerful images of California in the age of sailing and steamships.