Looking for the Lighthouse

When Su Corbaley was growing up, her father, Len, used to tell stories about the old Mare Island Lighthouse and their ancestor Kate McDougal, who was lightkeeper there for 36 of its 44 years. Su didn’t pay much attention; stories about old times had a way of going in one ear and out the other, as they do for most children. As she got older, though, she found herself wishing she had listened a little better, learned a little more.

That’s why I’m here with Len and Su on Mare Island on a warm, sunny morning in early spring: Su wants to hear more about those old days, and so do I. We’re scouting the area around where the lighthouse used to be, according to old photos and maps. Its exact location had been something of a mystery until fall 2007, when a consultant to the Mare Island Regional Park Task Force found evidence that pointed to this spot, partway up a bluff to the west of the Navy’s old munitions depot.

This part of Mare Island is slated to become a 215-acre regional park, but for now it is still off-limits to the public except for guided outings because the Navy has not yet completed environmental cleanup, and the City of Vallejo has not adopted a management plan for the park. Our guide today is Myrna Hayes, volunteer North Bay project manager for Arc Ecology, who brings groups out here at least once a month; she also cofounded Mare Island’s annual Flyway Festival. With us is Bob Palmer, who works for the Navy’s caretaker site office and is escorting us through the part of the property that the Navy still owns, which includes the purported lighthouse site. We’re watching Myrna climb an overgrown hillside in search of some sign of the old lighthouse buildings. Len’s not going up there with his bum knee, and Su seems skeptical. I can’t blame her--the slope is steep and crumbly, and looks like it’s positively oozing poison oak. But I’ve got my camera, and I figure the scramble will be worth it if there’s something interesting to shoot up there. There isn’t. If this is indeed the site, to the untrained eye there is nothing left to indicate it.

The Navy built the lighthouse in 1873 on the southern end of the island, near where the Napa River enters Carquinez Strait, to keep ships from running aground. Kate McDougal came to her position in 1881, propelled by a tragedy. In March of that year, her husband, Commander Charles McDougal, inspector of the Navy’s 12th Lighthouse District, drowned off Cape Mendocino while delivering supplies to the lighthouse crew. The gold to pay the men was strapped to his body, and when his dinghy capsized, “he went down like a fishing weight,” Len says. Left with four children--three girls and a boy, ages five to 14--and only a small stipend from the Navy, Kate needed a job. The keeper of the Mare Island light had recently resigned, so the Navy offered her the position. “There were no survivor benefits in those days,” he says, “but she was taken care of by the Navy family.”

Kate stayed at her post until 1917, Len says (other sources have her leaving at various times); nine days after she left, the nearby ammunition depot exploded, destroying numerous buildings and gutting the lighthouse, a Victorian confection festooned with gingerbread. The remains of the building were razed in the 1930s.

Len first heard about the Mare Island light and its keeper from his grandmother, Elizabeth Coffee, who was Kate McDougal’s niece. Born in San Francisco in 1883, Elizabeth often visited the lighthouse as a child during summer and holiday breaks, when she would hop aboard the Navy tug that brought supplies from San Francisco. Sometimes she stayed with her aunt and cousins for weeks at a time, and sometimes for the whole summer.

Life at the lighthouse must have been quite an adventure for young Elizabeth, who explored the island with her cousins and helped to tend the beacon and the gardens. For the rest of her life she loved to tell stories about the times she spent there. “She said the old lighthouse building was full of nooks and crannies where you could hide--curl up in a corner with the sun shining on your back and a good book to read,” Len says. Not everything was so cozy, though: Elizabeth also remembered that the island had an impressive number of rattlesnakes--so many that the gardener kept a hoe handy to chop off their heads.

The next stop on our tour this morning is a spot along a dirt road above where we think the lighthouse was, partway up the hill that comprises much of the southern end of Mare Island. We get out of our cars and peer downhill, locating the grove of eucalyptus that Myrna and I had scrambled up to. There’s nothing else to be seen, lighthouse-wise, but in any case our eyes are drawn to the water--Carquinez Strait, sparkling in the morning sun. A ferry glides silently toward Vallejo; the waves in its wake slap the shore below us. To our left the Carquinez Bridge spans the strait between Benicia and Crockett.

Having escorted us safely off Navy land, Bob peels off from the group, and we continue to the summit. A sculpture called the Spirit Ship, erected here in 1996 in tribute to the island’s naval shipyard workers, stands in stark outline against the green turf and blue water. Through the slight haze, we can see for miles in all directions--Mt. Tamalpais to the west, looming above San Pablo Bay; to the east, Carquinez Bridge and beyond it Suisun Bay; Mt. Diablo to the south. Below the bluffs on the southwestern shore of the island, grass growing on former dredge ponds glows a brilliant green. It’s easy to see why this area was chosen to become a park--it’s lovely, and peaceful.

In the 1880s this was a remote and isolated place, and Kate and her family must have been lonely sometimes, though they had a horse and buggy for visiting. Their friends at the Navy Yard looked out for them: at Christmastime in 1881 some officers put up poles and ran a telephone line out to the lighthouse. The family had regular help, too: a Chinese-American cook provided most of the meals, and an Irishman named Bonny helped with the heavy maintenance and took care of the horses and two cows, Chummy and Buttercup. Daughter Caroline had a mastiff dog named Makado for company.

For the most part, Kate educated the children herself, including preparing her son to enter the Naval Academy. (Later he joined the Marines, eventually rising to the rank of brigadier general.) Kate’s daughters were older than Elizabeth, who remembered spying on one of them “sparking” with her fiance in the lighthouse. All three girls were married in the lighthouse, and all three married military men. The eldest, also named Kate, returned to the lighthouse with her own daughter in 1898 when her husband left to serve in the Spanish-American War, and stayed until 1916, with her husband joining them between his many assignments. After the elder Kate retired, she went to live with Caroline, who was by then married to the medical officer at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, until her death in 1932, at the age of 90.

As we head back down the hill, Bob is waiting for us by the road with a surprise. He pulls two maps from his truck: one, dated 1911, has the lighthouse clearly marked, while one from 1930 shows buildings at the same site but does not name them. Len and Myrna are both excited; the maps are further proof that the lighthouse was located at the site pinpointed by the consultant. They’re also surprised that they have never seen these maps before, since they have been looking high and low for every bit of evidence they can find. “Nobody asked me,” Bob shrugs. They had been in old public works vaults all the while.

Our last stop is the old Navy cemetery to visit the graves of Kate and Charles McDougal and their daughter Kate and her husband. Len says that when he was here years ago, the cemetery was so overgrown with weeds that he stopped at the police station to complain. When he told the officers he’d just been looking for a gravesite, one of them exclaimed, “That place is loaded with rattlesnakes!” Today it looks (mostly) tidy, shaded by towering eucalyptus, with here and there a palm tree. Flowers have been placed by some of the grave markers. We spend a moment at a lovely monument to the sailors from the USS Boston who died in 1892 in an explosion near the ammunition depot while preparing shells for the ship. Kate’s daughter Betsy, who was nearby with the horse and buggy, helped ferry the wounded to the hospital and was later commended by the Secretary of the Navy for her bravery.

Len retired from the Navy in 1972 and began seriously researching his family history in 1974, after his grandmother died. “I never got around to sitting her down and grilling her, which I regret,” he says. He began collecting snippets of information from notes she had written--including those on photos and in the margins of books--then progressed to searching through military and other historical records, even visiting the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A few years ago, Su, a project manager at the Coastal Conservancy, gave him family tree-maker software for Christmas, which gave his efforts a real boost. Two books, Women Who Kept the Lights, by Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford, and Guardians of the Golden Gate, by Ralph Shanks and Lisa Woo Shanks, have also helped him find information about Kate and her family.

As we’re leaving, I ask him when he first began to take an interest in his grandmother’s old stories. “Way too late,” he says, shaking his head. “She used to go on and on and on. . . . You don’t pay any attention to what grandmother’s trying to tell you.”

For information on outings and events at the proposed regional park or elsewhere on Mare Island, go to www.sfbayflywayfestival.com or call (707) 649-9464.