To help vessels navigate the Detroit River around Belle Isle, this lighthouse was built on the southeast side of the island in 1882-83.

The tower was lit for the first time on May 15, 1882, but the lighthouse keeper's home was still under construction. It would be completed the following year, along with a boat-house and stone retaining wall.

Showing boats the way was a 2-foot-tall glass lens that relied on what was a revolutionary design capable of focusing light into a single beam that can be seen from more than 20 miles. The several-hundred-pound lens was developed by French physicist and engineer Augustin-Jean Fresnel.

The first lighthouse keeper was Anson Badger, who manned the light until 1886. There would be only two other men to ever serve as keepers of this lighthouse: Louis Fetes (1886-1907 and 1908-1930) and George Sherman (1907 – 1908).

In 1930, the William Livingstone Memorial Light was completed and led to the end of duty for the old lighthouse. In 1940, the federal government announced plans to demolish the old lighthouse and replace it with a Coast Guard station. Demolition on the lighthouse was completed in the fall of 1941.

The old lighthouse's lens was moved to the Livingstone light in 1935 or 1936, according to the Coast Guard, but further details were lost to time. The old manually operated lenses fell out of favor after the invention of automated beacons, and many were destroyed or scrapped for their brass during World War II.

In August 1980, thieves busted into the Livingstone light by prying open its brass-and-copper door and made off with two lenses, though it is unclear whether the Fresnel lens was among them.

Since the 1990s, the Coast Guard has aggressively tracked lenses and other property, a movement coinciding with lighthouse preservation efforts, Coast Guard curator Arlyn Danielson told The News for a Sept. 11, 2016, article.

“Lenses just weren’t valued back then like they are today,” she said. “They are pieces of art.”

In 2016, the federal government sued a Genoa Township, Mich., resident who somehow had come into possession of the lens from the old lighthouse. Estimated to be worth some $350,000, the government said the lens had been stolen and remained property of Uncle Sam. Federal court records described a decades-long hunt to track down the lenses, which ended when Steve Gronow, a real-estate developer and former auto parts baron who built a private museum in his 9,800-square-foot mansion complete with its own lighthouse, listed them for sale.

“It’s interesting now that because someone had the forethought to care for the lenses all these years — instead of smashing them to bits — that the government is coming out of the shadows and demanding they be returned without compensation,” Gronow told The News for the 2016 article.

Gronow also was in possession of a lens that had been stolen from the Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse in Maine. Combined, the lenses were said to be worth $600,000. Gronow said he had bought one lens from eBay and the other from the Henry County Historical Society in Indiana. Lighthouse preservationists defended Gronow, saying he had sought to save pieces of history that the government had previously shown no interest in saving them after the switch to automated beacons. Nevertheless, in March 2018, a judge sided with the government and forced Gronow to return the lenses.

“They were selling barrels of miscellaneous crap, and in some of those barrels were a number of lighthouse lenses,” John Polacsek, retired curator of the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle, told The News in 2016.