Buffalo Harbor Lighthouse - North and East Elevations - Blue - Framed & Mounted Print

This was the second lighthouse in Buffalo. It’s picture is included in the seal of the city of Buffalo symbolizing the city's tradition as an important port on the Great Lakes. It is situated on the whale head, or outer end of the Stone Mole, which projects one thousand five hundred feet from the shore, and on the south protects the harbor from the swell and ice of Lake Erie. The foundation of the light house is a mass of solid masonry, in Hydraulic lime, thirty feet in diameter, and nine feet deep. The basement of the light houses (forming an oil vault,) commences on the foundation, with a wall seven feet thick, tapering to four feet in the summit of the mole. The tower is an octagon constructed of hewn yellowish Limestone, forty-four feet high, twenty feet in diameter at the base, and twelve feet at the top, under the cornice. The walls are four feet thick at the base, tapering to two feet at the top, having at intervals of about six feet, iron bands in the middle of the wall to prevent the possibility of spreading. On the inside is a spiral or geometrical stone staircase, so constructed that each step has its broad end embedded in the wall, while its outer end constitutes a section of a central column. The floors and deck are of hewn stone, the doors and scuttles of copper, and the window sashes of wrought iron, so that there is not a particle of wood in or about the building except the boom, of necessity made of wood, which sustains the copper electric conductor. The lighting apparatus is in every respect of the most approved and perfect kind.