Point Sur Lightstation: Reopened and restoring

In early March 2020, Point Sur Lightstation welcomed its largest volunteer training class in years. Approximately 80 people were ready to give their time to the historic site. But the first day of training took an unexpected turn.

“We were introducing ourselves to each other, and the (state park) ranger came in and said, ‘You can’t meet’”  because of COVID-19 safety protocols,  recalled Carol O’Neil, a volunteer at Point Sur Lightstation and historian of the Central Coast Lighthouse Keepers. California State Parks owns Point Sur Historic State Park and manages volunteers while the nonprofit CCLK supports activities.

Right before the pandemic, the light station was ready to greet visitors once again after a 14-month closure. Three bridges on the road leading up to the site had required repairs. But COVID-19 forced a shutdown that Point Sur Lightstation, like so many other destinations, hasn’t fully recovered from.

“It’s been three years since we closed with the bridges, and we still haven’t brought back the number of tours we would normally have,” Carol O’Neil said. Currently, volunteers lead three-hour tours twice per week: Saturdays at 10 a.m. and Wednesdays at 1 p.m. They would typically host five in that timespan.

Today, the lighthouse flashes every 15 seconds at night thanks to a solar-powered LED. But between 1889 and 1972, lightkeepers had to constantly maintain a kerosene lamp at the heart of the building’s 18-foot-tall, 7,000-pound Fresnel lens. Highway 1 didn’t exist when the flame was first ignited, so lightkeepers and their families lived in a little community atop the volcanic hill where the lighthouse resides. Now, Point Sur Lightstation is California’s only complete turn-of-the-century light station open to the public.

The number of available tours depends on how many volunteers the light station has. These passionate individuals drive nearly all operations there – from running the gift shop to repairing buildings.

Carol O’Neil and her husband John, the chair of the Lighthouse Keepers, have been volunteering at Point Sur Lightstation since 1994. Before then, John O’Neil was in the military, so the couple had lived in various locations around the world.

“When we retired, we came back to Monterey where we had been stationed once,” he said. “And we needed something to do.”

“So here we are,” Carol O’Neil added.

The pair quickly fell in love with the light station. They briefly moved overseas after starting their volunteer work, but even then, Carol O’Neil continued writing for the Lighthouse Keepers’ quarterly newsletter. After two years, they returned to Monterey.

“It’s the people that we get to volunteer with,” she explained. “That’s why we keep coming back.”

The light station has opened and closed at various times throughout the pandemic, and volunteers have come and gone. But those who remained have kept themselves busy.

“We did a lot of work during that closure,” John O’Neil said. Today, a group of about 20 people takes care of maintenance, preservation and restoration of the light station’s numerous historical buildings.

At the communal apartments where assistant lightkeepers once lived, volunteers have been updating the stonework and converting a door to a window. These renovations aim to reflect the building’s appearance in 1929, the year all of the light station’s building exteriors will represent when fully renovated. Volunteers have also been slowly but surely restoring the apartment’s interior to show what the rooms looked like during a few different eras – 1889, 1907 and the 1920s. John O’Neil hopes the building will be finished and ready for tours in the next three to four years.

“We don’t move real fast,” he said. “But in that sense, we do a better job and make fewer mistakes.”

Over the last two years, volunteers have also been busy painting structures and fences, replacing windows in another building and testing the strength of the lighthouse’s stone, brick and mortar in preparation for the original Fresnel lens’s return.

The Fresnel lens sat on display in the Maritime Museum of Monterey, which later became the Dalí Museum, from 1992 to 2017. Now, it lies disassembled in storage, awaiting its reinstallation in Point Sur lighthouse.

But the several-thousand-pound lens requires heavy machinery to carry it to its old home, and two bridges leading up to the lighthouse still need repairs. One bridge currently cannot even hold the weight of a car. The weak structures also prohibit restoration efforts to the lighthouse building itself.

Last year, however, state officials budgeted $4.5 million for renovations to Point Sur State Historic Park to repair the bridges. Contracts with construction companies are still pending, but John O’Neil estimates the road will be ready for the Fresnel lens to be transported in 2024.

The O’Neils have remained passionate about restoring and sharing the wonders of Point Sur Lightstation for nearly three decades. They hope visitors walk away from the historical place having learned about life during the turn of the century.

“In many ways,” Carol O’Neil says, “it represents the history of technology, maritime, the United States, family life, California, Big Sur.”