Fairport Harbor West Breakwater Lighthouse Turns 100

Since officially making the Fairport Harbor West Breakwater Lighthouse her summer home in 2012, Sheila Consaul has had an open house every summer.

She anticipates even more people than usual for this year’s open house, scheduled from 12 to 4 p.m. on June 7. 

“I basically just open the doors and let people come in,” says Consaul, who lives in Ashburn, Virginia. “We’re expecting a lot of people this year because it is the 100th anniversary. It’s still really important to the community.”

Congress authorized the construction of a new lighthouse in 1917, but U.S. involvement in World War I delayed construction. The lighthouse was actually built in a factory in Buffalo and taken by ship down to the Lake County shore in Ohio, operating for the first time in 1925. 

Initially, it was an oil-lit lighthouse, and a lighthouse keeper lived on the premises until 1948, when the U.S. Coast Guard was able to lay a cable to electrify the light. At that point, the keeper didn’t have to live on the premises, and while the light shined on, the building around it fell into disuse and disrepair.

Consaul didn’t know much about the area —  except that her freshman roommate at Bradley University in Illinois was from Mentor, Ohio  — but she was looking for a waterfront summer home, keeping an eye out for a historic property. Around that time, he U.S. government had started to sell off lighthouses. Fairport Harbor West came up for sale in 2009, and she was able to close the deal by 2011. (She owns the building, but the Army Corps of Engineers still own the platform below it and the path to get there from the mainland.)

"It was basically vacant when I bought it,” she says. 

She purchased the house for $71,000  — and estimates she’s spent more than four times that in restoration costs. But now she’s got a 3,000-square-foot home with a kitchen, dining room, living room, three bedrooms and three bathrooms. “If I was going to turn it into a summer home, I thought I’d make it worthwhile,” she says.

The home is accessible from the mainland, but not enough so to have utilities. So there’s a generator and composting toilets. She can’t take water from the lake, so she collects rainwater for drinking and cleaning. And there’s no heat or air conditioning. “I had to go off the grid,” she says.

Consaul says she anticipates seeing a lot of people this weekend, and regularly hears from residents just passing by or on private tours. “If you look at Lake County, the lighthouse is everywhere,” she says. “It’s on the phone books. It’s on signs. It’s a symbol of the county, and people are so appreciative that someone’s stepped up to renovate it.”

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