Newly found photos document lighthouse life at Wisconsin's Apostle Islands

Washburn — When he wasn’t tending the Sand Island Lighthouse in the Apostle Islands, Emmanuel Luick apparently had a lot of time on his hands.

So he snapped pictures. Lots of them. In fact, during the winter in the early 1900s when Lake Superior iced up and the lighthouses closed, Luick operated a photo studio out of his Iron River home.

Though some of his pictures survived in family albums passed down through generations, pretty much all of the thousands of photos he took disappeared. No one knew what happened to them.

Then one day earlier this year, glass plate negatives from Luick’s cameras began showing up on eBay. Bob Mackreth, consulting historian of the Apostle Islands Historic Preservation Conservancy, got a tip about the eBay sales.

“I thought ‘Holy smoke.’ I checked it out and no doubt about it — they were genuine,” Mackreth said in an interview this week at a Washburn coffee shop.

Ecstatic to find such a treasure trove — 220 glass plate negatives in all — Mackreth and other members of the preservation group quickly raised money to buy the ones listed on eBay. They contacted the seller, a Duluth, Minn., antiques dealer who had purchased them in an estate sale, and arranged to buy the entire lot. Mackreth declined to reveal the sale price.

Except for one photo of two women throwing a football, none of the photos had been seen before or were in archives anywhere. Most were still housed in individual paper envelopes Luick used to store them with notes he scribbled about the dates and camera settings. Mackreth cross-referenced the photo envelope notes with the Sand Island Lighthouse keeper’s log and learned more about the circumstances of the pictures.

One photo shows Luick and assistant lighthouse keeper Fred Hudson pushing two wheelbarrows filled with clothes and blankets. It looks like they’re hauling laundry, but a darker tale emerged. By the date on the envelope Mackreth figured out the clothing and bedding were from the steamship Sevona, which sank near Sand Island in 1905 with the loss of seven lives.

The photos are filling in gaps in the history of the Apostle Islands, its lighthouses and the people who lived in and around Bayfield, said Jerry Phillips, president of the Bayfield Heritage Association.

“It’s caused so much excitement in the community because people will be able to see relatives. It does fill in incredible spaces in our history,” Phillips said.

“It was his eye and technique that make the photos extremely valuable to us. Of course, it’s humorous, in a way. We don’t normally think of going on eBay to find great treasures,” added Phillips.

Though some of the glass plate negatives have not weathered well and the emulsion has worn off, a majority are in very good shape. They’re in three sizes — 3-inch by 4-inch, 4 by 5, and 5 by 7.

“You can count the bricks in the lighthouse, you can count the feathers in the ladies’ hats,” said Mackreth.

According to notes on the envelopes, the photos were taken from 1900 to 1906. Luick was assistant keeper at Outer Island Lighthouse from 1887 to 1892 before moving to Sand Island, staying there until 1920 when it was the first Apostle Islands lighthouse to become automated. Then he was the Grand Marais, Minn., Lighthouse keeper from 1921 to 1936.

With only 220 negatives from a short period of time, Mackreth and other researchers are wondering what happened to the rest of Luick’s prodigious output.

Though there are a few photos of people posed in a studio, most of the pictures were taken on Sand Island or around Bayfield. They’re brief glimpses into a long bygone era when men cut ice blocks in the winter to keep their fish from spoiling in warmer months, girls played basketball dressed in bloomers and fishermen spent a lot of time repairing their nets.

Looking at the pictures, it’s easy to see Luick had a photographer’s eye for scale, proportion and detail. A photo of a young girl holding a doll on a swing is framed with white birch trees. A photo on the day Luick returned to Sand Island in spring 1902 shows a huge chunk of ice on the lakeshore in front of the lighthouse.

There also are a couple of pictures of Luick in the trove of negatives.

“Here’s a selfie 1905-style. I don’t know if he got someone to trip the shutter or if he set the timer,” said Mackreth, looking at a picture of Luick, in his light keeper’s uniform, standing on a boulder at the lake’s edge.

At the time of the photos, Luick’s first marriage was unraveling. Ella Luick was 16 when she married 27-year-old Luick, who met her in Rhode Island and brought her back to Sand Island. She took over the light keeper’s log, treating it like a diary, recording her boredom and dissatisfaction. Then in May 1905, Ella Luick jots down that she’s boarding a boat. She sailed away and was never heard from again — divorce papers were delivered the next year. Mackreth later learned, through census records, that she returned to Rhode Island, became a nurse and remarried.

Luick also remarried and had four children with his second wife; two of his sons lived to adulthood and left as soon as they could. Apparently, Luick was not an easy man to get along with, said Mackreth. He died in 1947 in Superior at the age of 80 or 81.

What happened to all of his negatives is anyone’s guess. Mackreth doesn’t know how they ended up in an estate sale in the Duluth area. He’s just thrilled they surfaced after so long.

Mackreth, a retired Apostle Islands National Lakeshore ranger and historian, has scanned and digitized the photos, which should be available for viewing on the Apostle Islands Historic Preservation Conservancy website later this summer. The conservancy is donating the pictures to the Bayfield Heritage Association, which will display the photos at its Bayfield museum by the end of this month.

Lighthouse life

To see more photos, go to jsonline.com/photos

 

Display planned

Recently discovered photos by Sand Island Lighthouse keeper Emmanuel Luick will be displayed by the end of June at the Bayfield Heritage Association Museum, 30 N. Broad St., Bayfield. For more information, visitbayfieldheritage.org.

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Newly found photos document lighthouse life at Wisconsin's Apostle Islands

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