California Lighthouses 1

Piedras Blancas Lighthouse

The quiet cove at San Simeon was a bustling seaport in the late 1800s. Whaling was a huge industry and ships that plied the waters off the Central Coast brought their catch in to the San Simeon pier to offload to the Whaling Station there.

The whaling station was established near San Simeon in 1864 to surprise the huge creatures as they hugged the nearby shoreline during their annual migration. By the early 1870s, San Simeon Bay had also become a substantial port, as lumber, farm produce, and Cinnabar, an ore mined for its mercury, were exported from California's Central Coast. The real reason for building a lighthouse at Piedras Blancas, however, was not for local commerce but to serve the maritime traffic traveling up and down the California coast.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo noted the three prominent rocks just north of San Simeon in 1542 and named them Piedras Blancas, which means white rocks. Naturally, ships’ captains tried to be careful of them, but many ships met their doom after slamming into them. A light station at Point Piedras Blancas, just north of the bay, was needed.  In 1866, this location was chosen to fill the gap between the lighthouses at Point Conception and Point Pinos.  The Lighthouse is located on a rugged windswept point of land six miles north of Hearst Castle, along California’s scenic Highway One.

On April 25, 1874, material for the tower was landed through the surf at the point, and a crew of around thirty began work on the ornate tower. Leveling the rock on the point to accommodate the tower proved more difficult than expected as the rock was "so hard as almost to resist the best tempered drills." The conical tower had an inside diameter of twenty-four feet at its polygonal base and tapered to a diameter of just over twelve feet at the parapet.

The Piedras Blancas Lighthouse was completed in 1875 and a two story Victorian style dwelling was completed in 1876. The original tower was 100 feet tall and a housed a first-order Fresnel lens. The tower contains a circular iron stairway which reaches to the light.  A fog signal building and additional keeper's dwelling were added in 1905.  

Lighthouses in California were generally built on top of high cliffs. The tall imposing lighthouses common on the Atlantic coast were not necessary thanks to the California terrain. But at Piedras Blancas, a classic tall lighthouse was built and it is now one of only two like that in the state, Pigeon Point being the other.

The large, two-story, Lighthouse Keepers’ Victorian dwelling had twelve rooms, stood fifty feet northeast of the tower, and housed three keepers and their families, though it was only designed for two.

While the keepers now had comfortable accommodations, they still lacked one critical thing - water. When rainfall proved inadequate at filling the station's water tanks, water had to be purchased and hauled in at a considerable expense. After Congress appropriated $2,000, a well was sunk at the station, and a pump powered by a windmill was erected over it to help supply the station's water.

Stephen H. Morse was the first head keeper of the station, and he was succeeded by Captain Lorin Vincent Thorndyke in 1879. Thorndyke was a native of Maine, and, before accepting the assignment at Piedras Blancas, he had circumnavigated the globe five times and served at several other lighthouses in California. Keeper Thorndyke married Elizabeth Jarmon soon after arriving at the station, and two sons, Lorin, Jr. and Emory, were born to them at the lighthouse.

Lorin, Jr. recalls that during two or three summers in the 1880’s a schooner from San Francisco anchored off the white rocks near the station to harvest the deep covering of guano that had accumulated over the years. Men were transferred to the rocks in small boats where they would shovel the droppings into sacks, which were then transferred to the schooner. As one can easily imagine, Lorin remembers that a most offensive odor drifted over the station when the guano was disturbed.

In 1906 a fog signal building was built. Inside was the latest equipment to make sound loud enough to carry out to sea. 

Different fuels were used over the years to burn and produce the light. Oil and kerosene were two of them and these were kept in a small bunker just below the lighthouse and in front of the fog signal building. This bunker was constructed of concrete and is the first concrete building built in San Luis Obispo County. Light keepers and their assistants had to haul the oil or kerosene from the bunker up to the lighthouse and then ascend the winding staircase to the lens housing area.

In the hills southeast of the lighthouse, William Randolph Hearst started construction of his expansive castle in 1919. The Piedras Blancas Lighthouse was incorporated into a crest found above the entrance to the living room in Casa del Monte, one of three guest "cottages" located near the castle. Work on the castle continued until Hearst left San Simeon in 1947.

In 1949 the lens and the upper section of the structure were removed due to earthquake damage and a rotating aero-beacon replaced it. The present height of the lighthouse is 74 feet. The Fresnel lens was saved and is housed in an enclosure in downtown Cambria.

Piedras Blancas Light Station, which was once administered by the U.S. Lighthouse Service, and then the U.S. Coast Guard, is now managed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. The BLM and the Piedras Blancas Light Station Association are restoring this historical site to its former glory.

The lighthouse grounds consist of fields full of native vegetation. For many years the area contained overgrown ice plant called capobrotus, the type seen along California freeways. Volunteers worked to pull this invasive plant out, but miraculously, the native vegetation began to return on its own. Docents have placed interpretive signs near the plants to benefit recognition.

Inside the lighthouse are displays explaining the early equipment used in operating the beacon. In the middle of the interior hangs a weighted pendulum that extends into an eight-foot hole in the floor. The pendulum swung and was part of the apparatus that made the beacon up top turn.

In the early days lighthouses were recognized by ships at sea during daylight hours by their special colors. Each lighthouse was assigned a specific set of colors and was painted accordingly. A ship passing by could tell where they were based on those colors. The ship’s captain could spy them through his looking glass and say, “Aha, white with black, we must be at Point Piedras Blancas.”

Recently the lighthouse was painted a bright white with dark trim. This removed the grime and rust stains that had been part of the façade for many years. Salt air takes its toll on buildings situated by the sea so five special coats of paint were applied to the lighthouse structure to protect it. The structure now more closely resembles what it looked like in its earliest days.

Volunteers have worked more than 100,000 hours restoring the lighthouse and surrounding buildings. The fuel oil house has been restored and a replica of the station’s shingled watch room has been completed. Other historic structures on the site have also been repaired. The next project slated to be done is to replicate the tower’s lantern room and although the Fresnel lens will not be moved back, this will have the lighthouse appearing exactly as it was when it was first built.

Tours of the light station are offered if you visit.

Just south of the lighthouse is a relatively new elephant seal colony. It is believed that overcrowding at other colonies prompted a group of seals to found the new colony around 1990. From an original population of just nineteen, the colony attracted approximately 10,000 seals in the year 2000.  Vicki and I took photos of them when we visited.

Thanks to several varieties of seals along with gulls, cormorants and other winged creatures, the rocks offshore from the lighthouse seem certain to retain the name of Piedras Blancas.