The name Wayne Wheeler has become synonymous with lighthouse preservation and education. He’s one of the pioneers of the lighthouse preservation movement and one of the foremost experts on lighthouse history in the U.S. A 1962 graduate of Syracuse University, Wayne spent 23 years in the Coast Guard in the aids to navigation field. In the early 1980s, when he was the chief of the Coast Guard’s aids to navigation branch in northern California, questions involving lighthouses were always being forwarded to him. As a result, the United States Lighthouse Society came into being in 1984.
Wayne received the Heritage Award from the Foundation of Coast Guard History for creating the United States Lighthouse Society, and the American Lighthouse Coordinating Committee presented him with the H. Ross Holland Lifetime achievement Award in 2004. Today, Wayne is the president emeritus of the Society. Wayne’s wife, Sally, also takes part in this interview, which was recorded in Washington state in March 2024.
Also featured is a new segment on news from the lighthouses of southern New England, with Judianne Point.
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U.S. Lighthouse Society Historian Jeremy D’Entremont is the author of 24 books and hundreds of articles on lighthouses and maritime history. He is a past president of the American Lighthouse Foundation and founder of Friends of Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouses, and he has lectured and narrated cruises throughout the Northeast and in other regions. He is also the producer and host of the U.S. Lighthouse Society’s weekly podcast, “Light Hearted.” He can be emailed at Jeremy@uslhs.org
What are the three highest currently-active lighthouses in the US?
I gleaned this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makapu%CA%BBu_Point_Light#History:
Point Loma Lighthouse, 462ft
Cape Mendocino Light, 422ft
Makapuʻu Point Light, 420ft
But I am pretty sure that neither Point Loma nor Cape Mendocino Light is active any longer. Is that correct?
That’s correct. In the case of Point Loma, a new lighthouse had to be built because the orginal one was so high it was often dimmed by cloud cover. Cape Mendocino Lighthouse was moved to a park in Shelter Cove, CA, in 1998.