To Save The Devils Island Lens

Part Two

Back to Part One

At the time, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore was still young as national parks go. Today it’s taken for granted that the National Park Service owns the islands and the lighthouses on them, while the Coast Guard has a duty to maintain navigational aids in the towers, but in 1988, there was still plenty of doubt as to which agency owned just what. Under the circumstances, the National Park Service response to the lens removal plan was limited to polite letters of protest, essentially asking, "Please don't take the lens out," and "If you do, can we keep it here?"

“Saving the Lens” became a cause celebre, but Coast Guard officials didn’t seem to care. Later on, an agency spokesman defended the decision:

“There has been a lot of hate and discontent in Wisconsin, and people saying it was an intentional move to take it away from the state, and we intended that it never return. That is not true. I can understand how somebody can misunderstand because (the lens went) across the state line. Unfortunately we are not as sensitive about this as we should have been in this case.”

At the time, though, the Coast Guard insisted there was no room for debate: the lens had to go.

This is where three local citizens came to the rescue: Betty Ferris, Warren Nelson, and Janet Bewley. In August 1989, taking advantage of a law that requires Federal agencies to consult with individual states in matters historic, the trio filed suit in a Madison court, accompanied by representatives of several preservation groups. Their demand was simple: order the Coast Guard to leave the lens in place.

Just a few days later, a Coast Guard crew removed the lens, damaging its prisms in the process. The citizen activists pressed on. The struggle was long and complex, and as time passed, the NPS played a more confident role, yet the Coast Guard wouldn’t budge.

At the end of May 1991, the court settled the matter: “Put that lens back,” it ruled.

It took only a few days to tear the lens out of the tower, but putting everything back together was harder. A technician from the National Park Service spent several weeks repairing the prisms in a borrowed Bayfield schoolroom, while local personnel arranged the logistics of the reinstallation.

Unloading the Chopper

On the morning of August 31, 1992, a National Guard helicopter carried several crates filled with prisms and brass fittings back to the island. A waiting crew of National Park Service employees sorted the pieces out, and winched them to the top of the tower, where a lens expert from California donated his skill to put them together. By nightfall, the Devils Island lens was back where it belonged.

	Several organizations and government agencies were part of this effort by the end, but the victory would have been impossible without three private citizens who wouldn’t back down: Betty Ferris, Warren Nelson, and Janet Bewley.
Winching the heavy lens base into the tower.

The author was on Devils Island the day the lens was returned to the tower, serving as Safety Officer for the project and helping with the winch cables.