A HISTORY LOST

My joy at finding the other half of the collection would be dampened rather quickly. The National Archives has regional centers to house many of their historical documents and records.

Chicago is one of those centers housing the Great Lake’s Maritime collection. Doing a search for the lighthouse logbooks for the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse located in Buffalo, NY directed me to the Chicago archives. This was perplexing because they housed only the logbooks for the Great Lakes Life Saving Stations. After contacting the archivist in Chicago I was informed they only had the books for the Buffalo Life Saving Station, not the lighthouses. This was correct since the Washington D.C. Archives should have only the books for the lighthouses. This I knew from previous research.

Searching their archives yielded nothing. They must be there, I was sure of it, but where? Especially now when It was all coming together. If the logbooks were in D.C., I would go back the following summer. If they were however, in Chicago the trip to Ohio could be combined with a day spent at the regional archives. Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse had after all been Edward’s very first lighthouse. It was important to have the pages from the logbooks when he had been an assistant keeper in Buffalo, NY. Emails were sent back and forth to both institutions. Both archival staff members were kindly searching. Chicago replied back they did not have the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse logbooks. They had to be in Washington D.C. in the National Archives. I waited for an answer before completing plans for my trip to Marblehead.

After several weeks and much digging by the dedicated archival staff came an answer. There were no logbooks for the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse located anywhere in the National Archives. Period! Gone! Forever!

Men had risked their lives to keep mariners and civilians safe. They had withstood the brutal winters and storms often being stranded for weeks on this lighthouse. They had dutifully recorded day after day the events surrounding their work and the rescues they had conducted. Snippets of their exploits remained only through the few letters, newspaper articles and personal recollections and these were precious few.

I slowly came to realize the only records left to survive may be in Edward’s collection. The painful realization that history is only one generation and one story away from extinction began to carve a path to my own soul. Certainly not the fault of the National Archives, they are only able to preserve what they are given. Certainly not the fault of the Keepers, they were busy saving lives. Did they remain in someone’s basement, pilfered when the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse was closed? Or were they stashed away in a private collection of no use to anyone except they “added” to the collector’s prestige?

Another irony of history’s fate was the fact the lighthouse the logbooks were missing from was left to die a slow, painful death at the foot of the harbor to Buffalo, NY. No one had ever really like it, even during its lifetime. It was considered to be aesthetically unappealing and a dangerous place to work. Indeed, early prints of the Buffalo harbor show clearly the Buffalo Main Light. However, Horseshoe Reef the older of the two remains an enigma. Even the artists had decided its fate 150 years ago.

But a group of men, Lighthouse Keepers had ignored all this because there was a greater good at stake, the lives of drowning sailors, men, women, children and even human smugglers. Only now, too late to save, the keepers and their history was lost. It was gone forever, like those who rest beneath the waters of the Great Lakes, drowned in the ship wrecks of the inland seas. I wept for this history because its loss was my despair. Their history had become my history, their story, my story. But it can no longer be told because it is extinct. Forever!