Battery Point Lighthouse

The bronze closes the lighthouse's story in 1953 with its last keeper, Wayne Piland, whom the state register misspells Philand. Its best-remembered night came later. Near midnight on March 27, 1964, waves from the Alaska earthquake reached Crescent City. Peggy and Roxey Coons, living in the lighthouse as curators, watched the fourth wave draw the harbor dry for three-quarters of a mile before it came back through the town. Eleven people died. The lighthouse, on its tidal island, was not harmed.

What the plaque says

Battery Point Lighthouse The Battery Point Lighthouse is one of the first lighthouses on the California coast. Rugged mountains and unbridged rivers meant coastal travel was essential for the economic survival of this region. In 1855 Congress appropriated $15,000 for the construction of the light station, which was completed in 1856 by the U.S. Lighthouse Service. Theophilis Magruder was the station's first keeper; Wayne Piland was its last before automation in 1953. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 951 Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Del Norte County Historical Society, September 19, 1987.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crescent City Harbor — 1.0 mi
  The harbor the Pacific aims its tsunamis at, rebuilt after 2011 to ride the next one out.
• Stout Memorial Grove — 6.8 mi
  A lumberman's memorial made of the kind of forest his company cut, kept open underneath by the river's floods.
• Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon — 25 mi
  A beach that set off a gold stampede in 1850, and the fern-walled slot a creek has cut through the same bluffs.

More markers nearby

• S.S. Emidio — 0.6 mi
• Brother Jonathan Cemetery — 0.7 mi
• Site of Old Indian Village at Pebble Beach, Crescent City — 1.3 mi
• Crescent City Plank and Turnpike Road — 5.1 mi