What is the oldest lighthouse on Lake Erie?

It depends on the question

Lighthouse 'oldest' claims are slippery because a station, a tower and a working light are different things. A station may be older than its present tower; a tower may stand long after its light went dark; and some lights have been moved. This page separates the questions and names the source for each answer.

The first lights: Buffalo and Erie, 1818

Congress approved the first two federal lighthouses on the Great Lakes in 1810, one at the mouth of Buffalo Creek and one at Presque Isle, the bay that became Erie's harbor; both were delayed until 1818.^[1] The Buffalo Lighthouse Association describes the 1818 Buffalo light as the first American lighthouse lit on the Great Lakes; it was replaced in 1833 and torn down in the late 1840s.^[2] At Erie the original tower sank into quicksand, as did its successor, and the present Erie Land Lighthouse dates from 1867.^[1]

The oldest still standing

The Marblehead Lighthouse, built of local limestone in 1821 and first lit in 1822, is the oldest tower on the lake that still stands and still works.^[3,4] Descriptions vary in their wording: the Lighthouse Directory calls it “the oldest active lighthouse on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes”, Wikipedia the oldest in continuous operation on the American side, and Ohio Sea Grant the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the Great Lakes.^[5,4,6] Next in age among the towers in this gazetteer come Barcelona, New York, built in 1829 and known for burning natural gas from 1831, and the Buffalo Main Lighthouse of 1833, the oldest lighthouse in Buffalo still on its original site.^[7,8]

On the Canadian shore

On the Ontario side, the oldest towers in this gazetteer are the stone lighthouse at the north end of Pelee Island, dated to 1833 by Wikipedia and the Lighthouse Directory and to 1834 by Ontario Parks, and the limestone tower on Bois Blanc Island at the mouth of the Detroit River, built in 1836.^[9,10,11] The Port Burwell lighthouse of 1840 is ranked by the Canadian Register of Historic Places as the oldest wooden lighthouse on Canada's Lake Erie shore.^[12]

Questions people ask

Is Marblehead the oldest lighthouse on the Great Lakes?

It is usually described as the oldest in continuous operation on the U.S. side. Sources word the claim differently, and older stations existed whose original towers are gone.

What was the first lighthouse on Lake Erie?

The first two U.S. Great Lakes lighthouses were built in 1818 at Buffalo and at Erie, Pennsylvania. Neither original tower survives.