Photograph of South Manitou Island Lighthouse — Photograph by Geoffrey George, Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

South Manitou Island Lighthouse Complex and Life Saving Station Historical District

Built in 1840. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

From the record

“South Manitou Island Lighthouse is located on South Manitou Island in Lake Michigan, 16 miles (26 km) west of Leland, Michigan. It is in Leelanau County in western Northern Michigan.”
Wikipedia article South Manitou Island Lighthouse, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 25 National Register listings published here for Leelanau County · listed in 1983 · category: District · built in 1840, by Orlando Metcalfe Poe.

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

The listing

Address. Sandy Point, South Manitou Island, 49654
When was it listed? October 1983
Category. district
Township. Glen Arbor township
When was it built? 1840
Architect. Orlando Metcalfe Poe
National Register reference number. 83003782 - 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

2 since 1993

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 2 fires within 5 miles of South Manitou Island Lighthouse Complex and Life Saving Station Historical District between 1993 and 1999, burning under an acre in total. None 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
Recreation and ceremony	1
Smoking	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
20 August 1993	Smoking	under an acre	Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore	BOARDWALK
30 May 1999	Recreation and ceremony	under an acre	Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore	MADDUX

Every fire recorded in Leelanau 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

5 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.

Property	Distance	Listed
George Conrad Hutzler Farm	1.9 miles	1991
Hutzler's Barn	2.2 miles	1978
North Manitou Shoal Light Station	6.7 miles	2005
Sleeping Bear Point Life Saving Station	7.6 miles	1979
Sleeping Bear Inn	7.9 miles	1979

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 83003782 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Leelanau County	All 25 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.