Enlightened, Lakeside

In the early 1800s, Lake Pontchartrain was a bustle of maritime traffic carrying goods and passengers to canals leading into the heart of New Orleans and to resort towns on the Northshore. Three historic lighthouses—New Canal, Milneburg, and Tchefuncte River—guided ships safely across the Lake and still stand today as a testament to Lake Pontchartain’s heyday of commerce and travel.

New Canal Lighthouse

Once used to guide sailors across Lake Pontchartrain to the entrance of the former New Basin Canal, the current New Canal Lighthouse, built in 2013, is the fourth version to grace these shores. 

The story of lighting the Canal begins in the 1700s, when the French Creoles were using Bayou St. John to sail from Lake Pontchartrain into downtown New Orleans. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans from other colonies began pouring into the area, wanting their own route to the city. 

“The French Creoles managed Bayou St. John and charged the Americans more,” said Kate Tannian, Museum Visitor Services Manager at the New Canal Lighthouse. “They also played tricks on them. Ships would get pulled down the canal by horses. They would let the Americans in at the end of the day and then send all their workers home.” 

To address the problem, the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company hired Irish and German immigrants to dig the New Basin Canal between 1832 and 1838. The first lighthouse—an octagonal, cypress tower with a fixed light on top—went up at the mouth of the canal in 1839. Built on pilings in Lake Pontchartrain, the structure was short-lived.

“They basically built a thin, tall tower on top of a sponge, and over time, it sunk and fell,” explained Tannian. 

In 1855, a second, square lighthouse with a wider footprint and iron pilings was constructed.  The one-story building worked well until 1880 when the Southern Yacht Club built a two-story building next door and blocked out part of the guiding light. The second lighthouse was sold at auction in 1890 and taken away, making way for a new two-story, wedding-cake-style structure. All three of these versions of the lighthouse originally stood offshore, until the city drained the marsh and created the Lakefront Park in the 1930s. 

The New Canal Lighthouse is notable for its large number of female light keepers, possibly the most of any in the nation. One late nineteenth, early twentieth century keeper, Margaret Norvell, saw a Navy plane crash in the lake and saved the pilot’s life by rowing out to rescue him. On another occasion, she saw a pleasure cruise catch fire and rallied local fishermen to help save the more than two hundred passengers. 

In the 1940s and ‘50s, the New Basin Canal was filled in, and the Coast Guard took over the lighthouse between the early 1960s and 2001. The Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation (LPBF), now known as the Pontchartrain Conservancy, had plans to lease the lighthouse when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Although damaged, the lighthouse still stood until a November winter storm dropped the steel cupola and shattered it.

In 2007, LPBF took the lighthouse apart piece by piece and put it in storage, embarking on a multi-year effort to raise money to rebuild it in 2013. “We used fifty percent of the original materials. We’re lucky we had the blueprints, so we built it almost exactly how it was before, but we raised it nineteen feet and moved the bell tower,” said Tannian.

Today, the Pontchartrain Conservancy runs an education center out of the lighthouse, including a geological history of Southeast Louisiana, the ecology of Lake Pontchartrain, and a history of the lighthouse. scienceforourcoast.org. 

Milneburg Lighthouse

“Milneburg was an example of the saying, ‘If they build it, they will come,’” said Tannian, referring to the lakeside resort town built in the early 1830s by Scottish-born Alexander Milne. To escape the oppressive summer heat, New Orleans residents could ride the steam train, called the “Smoky Mary” from the French Quarter to Milneburg, a twenty minute journey, and stay at the resort or board a steamer at Port Pontchartrain headed for the Northshore. 

To help guide sailors, the railroad company built the predecessor to the Milneburg Lighthouse—two poles supporting a square lantern fifty feet in the air. In 1837, Congress allocated funds for a twenty-eight-foot-tall, octagonal wooden lighthouse four miles east of New Canal Lighthouse. Unlike the New Canal Lighthouse’s fixed light, Milneburg’s featured a flashing light made from ten lamps and fourteen-inch reflectors attached to a revolving chandelier.

In a 2019 history of Milneburg written for The Advocate,  Richard Campanella, Tulane School of Architecture geographer, compared the Milneburg Lighthouse to the iconic Biloxi Lighthouse as “the icon of this coastal hamlet.”

Following a similar fate as the original New Canal Lighthouse, the Milneburg Lighthouse quickly disintegrated. In 1855, pilings were driven into Lake Pontchartrain two-thousand feet from shore and a concrete platform was built with a brick tower and a fifth-order Fresnel lens on top.

In 1869, a hurricane destroyed the lighthouse keeper’s kitchen, cistern, and plank walk from the keeper’s house to the railroad. Although the keeper’s home withstood the storm, it was precariously balanced atop now rotten pilings. The home was replaced in 1871, along with the kitchen, cistern, and plank walk.

The lighthouse received additional brickwork in 1880 to support a new lantern room. The addition raised the tower seven feet and created a flared appearance at the top.

A 1915 hurricane flooded the village of Milneburg and washed away many of the camps built there. Although the community was rebuilt and remained popular until the 1930s, much of the area was then destroyed when the Levee Board built a seawall and began creating man-made land within it. The Milneburg Lighthouse, which was discontinued in 1929, survived the transition but shifted from offshore to onshore without moving an inch from its original location. 

In 1939, the area transformed again into the Pontchartrain Beach, which operated as an amusement park until 1983, during which time the lighthouse was utilized as office space. Today, the Milneburg Lighthouse still stands sentry over Lake Pontchartrain from its prominent location in the University of New Orleans’ Research and Technology Park.

Like the New Canal Lighthouse, the Milneburg Lighthouse boasted three women lighthouse keepers, including Norvell, who served at Milneburg from 1896 to 1924 before transferring to the New Canal Lighthouse. During her tenure at Milneburg, she braved two hurricanes and sheltered more than two hundred survivors after a 1903 storm. She often hosted the Sisters of Charity, the poor, and the blind, and the Milneburg Lighthouse design later became the inspiration for the Lighthouse for the Blind building on Camp Street in downtown New Orleans. In 2013, the Coast Guard named a Cutter after Norvell. 

Tchefuncte River Lighthouse

From Port Pontchartrain in Milneburg, wealthy New Orleans residents often boarded the steam ferry headed for the charming Northshore town of Madisonville on the banks of the Tchefuncte River. In 1837, ten Argand lamps with a parabolic reflector were placed within a thirty-six-foot-tall brick tower at the mouth of the Tchefuncte to guide ships to Madisonville.

The first keeper of the lighthouse, Benjamin Thurston, lived onsite with his pet alligators. In 1854, a 212-foot breakwater was built for protection, and in 1857, the lighthouse was upgraded with a fifth-order Fresnel lens.

The lighthouse sustained extensive damage during the Civil War, and in 1867, workers constructed a new tower ten feet higher on the original foundation. For the top, the tower was adorned with the lantern room from Mississippi’s destroyed Cat Island Lighthouse. Next door stood the keeper’s home and a bell tower. 

Hurricanes and storms, typical of the Gulf Coast, further damaged the breakwater in 1874 and 1879, and swept away the kitchen, woodshed, and outhouses in 1888. Resiliency is key to living in south Louisiana, and thus everything was rebuilt stronger and better able to sustain such devastation. 

Keepers at the new lighthouse experienced further hurricanes and witnessed changes over time, such as the installation of a telephone in 1927 and  the arrival of electricity in 1935. The last keeper left in 1939, and the light became fully automated in 1952. 

The lighthouse still functions today with a solar-powered light flashing every nine seconds to mark the way. In 1999, the town of Madisonville took over ownership of the lighthouse and entered into an agreement with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum, which now acts as a steward of the site. Together, the two entities began a campaign to restore it, and by 2008, had completed restoring the exterior masonry and the interior spiral staircase. 

“At one time, the intent was to build an area around the lighthouse that people could visit,” said Jim MacPherson, Executive Director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum. Struggling with funding and permitting issues, the project was put on hold until 2019, when St. Tammany Parish earmarked $1.6 million in Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA) funding for the project. 

“We’ve been working with the Army Corps and the State Historic Preservation Office to push this through in conjunction with the Parish,” explained MacPherson. “We want to add sheet piling around the southeast, south, and southwest part of the lighthouse and also a dock or pier … At that point, we’ll look at refurbishing to get people to go out there [for tours offered through the museum].” MacPherson is hopeful work can be underway by mid-2023. 

Meanwhile, the keeper’s dwelling was sold in 1955 and moved into town, occupied through the years by a doctor, a boat yard office, and a camp. In 2004, it was donated to the town and moved to the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum. Along with the dwelling, the museum features artist Nelson Plaisance’s dioramas of Gulf Coast lighthouses, including the three beacons of the Pontchartrain. lpbmm.org.