Elizabeth would become one of those few after a stormy night in 1872. Only a small number of these women were ever officially appointed as light keepers. However, many woman rose to these challenges and earned the respect of their communities through their actions. Light keeping was normally thought of as a man’s job, involving heavy physical labor and an enormous investment of time. Women taking on light-keeping duties unofficially for ill husbands or other family members was more common than the strict gender divides and roles of the day might have suggested. Elizabeth thought of tending the light as both a duty and a pleasure writing, “My three brothers were then sailing, and how glad I felt that their eyes might catch the bright rays of our light shining out over the waste of waters on a dark stormy night.” When the keeper of the light, Peter McKinley, resigned his post to due ill health Elizabeth’s husband was appointed to take his place.Ĭlement, however, was also often in poor health himself and many of the keeper’s duties fell to his wife, specifically the cleaning and polishing of the Fresnel lens. This arrangement would prove crucial to Elizabeth’s close connection to lighthouses in the years to come. He was soon appointed a teacher at the local Native American school and Elizabeth passed a happy two years helping him by teaching European gardening methods.Įlizabeth and her husband were neighbors to the McKinley family at this time, who tended the Beaver Island Harbor Lighthouse (pictured at left). Clement was a cooper who had come from Detroit to the island for his health. Shortly after their return, in 1860, Elizabeth met and married Clement Van Riper. Eventually the schisms between the Mormons and the other groups on the island caused the Whitney family to move to Charlevoix in 1852 and later to Traverse City.Īfter the assassination of King Strang and the release of the island from Mormon control, the Whitney family returned. William’s autobiography focuses mainly on this time in her life. Her father, a ship’s carpenter, found work on the island from the notorious Mormon leader, “King” James Jesse Strang. Her story, much like the Fresnel lens she describes in the above passage, helps to illuminate the trials of a female lighthouse keeper in an age when women rarely worked outside the home.īorn on Mackinac Island around 1844, Elizabeth’s family had moved to Beaver Island by the time she was four years old. What more is needed of nature’s beauty to make the picture complete?”Įlizabeth Whitney Williams (pictured at right) wrote these words in her autobiography, A Child of the Sea, and Life among the Mormons, about the Little Traverse Lighthouse on Harbor Point, Michigan where she was the keeper for 29 years. “On the end of the Point stands the lighthouse with its red light flashing out at night over the waters, looking like a great red ruby set with diamonds as the electric lights are shining around the bay and harbor.
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