San Juan Island

Friday Harbor is a charming, historic, walkable seaport just steps from the ferry landing.

In 1859 an American shot an Englishman’s pig which kept breaking through a fence and rooting in his potato patch. This incident erupted into the Pig War, an international dispute over whether Great Britain or the United States owned the islands of what is now San Juan County.

The first light at Cattle Point was a lens lantern on a post erected in 1888. In 1921, the U.S. Navy installed a radio compass station. The modern 34-foot (10 m), octagonal, concrete tower on Cattle Point was erected in 1935. Following automation in the late 1950s, the tower’s lantern was removed and replaced with a 250-mm drum lens that sits on a short mast on top of the tower. The lighthouse received a temporary makeover in 1984, when it was used as a backdrop for an Exxon television commercial. The commercial’s ahistorical additions were subsequently removed. The Coast Guard announced plans to reinforce the structure, which was in danger of collapse from the forces of erosion, during the summer of 2010.

The Lime Kiln Light was established in 1914 when acetylene lights were placed on Lime Kiln Point, a name derived from the lime kilns built there in the 1860s. It was the last major light established in Washington. The light was updated five years later with a 38-foot (12 m) octagonal concrete tower rising from the fog signal building, a design that matches the Alki Point Light in Seattle. Two keeper’s houses and other structures also date from around this time. A fourth-order Fresnel lens was first exhibited from the new tower on June 30, 1919. The Coast Guard automated the Lime Kiln Lighthouse in August 1962, using photoelectric cells to turn the light on at dusk and off during daylight hours. In 1998, the drum lens was replaced with a modern optic, flashing a white light once every 10 seconds. Sitting on the rocky shoreline at a height of 55 feet (17 m), the beacon is visible for 15 nautical miles; 27 kilometres (17 mi).