Poverty Island Light Station

Built in 1875. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

From the record

“The Poverty Island Light is a light house located on Poverty Island in northwestern Lake Michigan, 5.8 miles (9.3 km) south of Garden Peninsula. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005 as the Poverty Island Light Station.”
Wikipedia article Poverty Island Light Station, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 15 National Register listings published here for Delta County · listed in 2005 · category: Structure · built in 1875.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

Address. NW Lake Michigan, 5.8 mi. S of Garden Peninsula at Fairport, Fairbanks Township
When was it listed? September 2005
Category. structure
Township. Fairbanks township
When was it built? 1875
National Register reference number. 05000984 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Fires near this property

1 since 2016

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 1 fire within 5 miles of Poverty Island Light Station in 2016, burning about 127 acres in total. 1 started naturally. None was recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Natural	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
30 June 2016	Natural	127 acres	Michigan Agency	POVERTY ISLAND

Every fire recorded in Delta County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

1 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Photograph	Property	Distance	Listed
	St. Martin Island Light Station	4.8 miles	1984

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 05000984 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Delta County	All 15 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.