Heceta Head was a remote place in the late nineteenth century. The first keeper of the lighthouse was Andrew Hald. They finally arrived in February 1894, and the light was first lit on March 30, 1894. Though the lens and its clockwork mechanism arrived at the station in October, it could only be partially installed because the lighthouse lamps, shipped from Staten Island, New York, were still in transit. Chance Brothers had packed the lens in a container of molasses so that it would survive the arduous journey. The 56-foot-tall lighthouse tower was completed in August 1893, but the first-order Fresnel lens-built by the Chance Brothers of Birmingham, England-did not arrive aboard the tender Manzanita until the fall of that year. Brick, lime, and cement were brought by ship from San Francisco, and supplies were towed to the mouth of the Siuslaw River and loaded onto wagons for the trip down the road, which was often impassable due to high tides, muddy conditions, and inclement weather. The dwellings were built in a Queen Anne style. Montgomery & Company of Portland was the principal contractor for the lighthouse buildings, which included two kerosene-oil houses, a barn, the head keeper’s dwelling, and a duplex for the assistant keepers. The seven-mile road over beaches, dunes, and sheer basalt was completed by April 1892. William Cox, owner of the nearby ranch, gave the government right-of-way permission over his land. Department of the Interior also set aside 239 acres of public land as a lighthouse reservation, both for potential future expansion and to prevent others from encroaching on the lighthouse area.īefore construction could begin, the Lighthouse Service needed to build a wagon road to Florence in order to haul essential supplies to level the benches (wave-cut shelves along the shore) before construction. and Dolly Warren, who had filed a claim for 164 acres three years before.
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In 1891, the government purchased a nineteen-acre parcel, plus rights to a spring, for $825 from homesteaders Welcome E. Congress appropriated $80,000 in 1889 to build a first-class light station on Heceta Head.
The headland was ideal for this purpose-not only extending far to sea, but also with a southern flank that at the time was fully open to view across meadows (likely created by Native burning) where a dense Sitka spruce forest now stands. In support of its goal to have a light visible along the entire Oregon Coast, the United States Lighthouse Board recommended a lighthouse at Heceta Head due to the ninety-mile gap between lighthouses at Yaquina Head and Cape Arago. In 1862, George Davidson of the Coast Survey named Heceta Head in his honor. Spanish Basque explorer Bruno de Heceta (or Hezeta) y Dudagoitia sailed along the Oregon Coast in 1775 as part of an expedition for the Spanish crown, to explore and bolster Spain’s claims to the coast between San Blas, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest coast as far north as southern Alaska. Visible for twenty-one miles, it remains Oregon’s most powerful lighthouse beam. The light shining from the 56-foot-high tower flashes a white beam for eight seconds every minute. Heceta Head Lighthouse stands 205 feet above the Pacific Ocean on a bluff carved out of the west side of 1,000-foot-high Heceta Head, twelve miles north of Florence.
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