Split Rock Lighthouse State Park

About this park

Split Rock Lighthouse State Park protects one of the most photographed lighthouses in the entire United States, perched atop a dramatic anorthosite bluff overlooking Lake Superior. The lighthouse's origin traces to a single catastrophic storm: a punishing November gale in 1905, the kind for which Lake Superior is infamous, sank the steamship Edenborn and the barge Madeira it was towing, along with five other vessels, all within a dozen miles of the Split Rock River, a tragedy that galvanized demand for a warning beacon on this treacherous stretch of coast. Construction finished in 1909, and the light was commissioned the following year, its 370,000-candlepower beacon warning ships away from the rocky shoreline for 59 continuous years of staffed operation. The federal government deeded the lighthouse station to the State of Minnesota in 1971, and the Minnesota Historical Society has operated it as a historic site since 1976, preserving both the light tower and the keepers' dwellings as a window into early 20th-century maritime life on Lake Superior. Before the lighthouse existed, the Merrill and Ring Lumber Company logged nearly all the original Norway and white pine from this stretch of coast between 1899 and 1906, operating a short logging railroad whose wharf and dam pilings can still be seen jutting from the water at the mouth of the Split Rock River. Today the park's cart-in campsites along the Lake Superior shoreline connect directly to the Superior Hiking Trail, and anglers cast for lake trout, salmon, and brown trout from the rocky shoreline, while peregrine falcons, moose, and black bear round out a wildlife list as dramatic as the park's cliffside geology.