Emmanuel Luick, Light Tamer
IT MAY SOUND ODD TO SAY a lighthouse keeper is shining light some seventy-two years after his death, but in a remarkable way Emmanuel Luick is doing just that. Long after his years spent working to protect lives in the waters of Lake Superior, a collection of historic photographs Luick took more than a century ago offers a revealing portrait of daily life among an isolated community of fishermen and their families. The photographs, says historian and retired national park ranger Bob Mackreth, are “a small but remarkable treasure”—one that for decades had been almost entirely hidden from public view.1
Luick was both a lighthouse keeper and studio photographer for most of his adult life. He first laid eyes on Lake Superior in 1887 when, as a young man, he traveled from Custar, Ohio, to Madeline Island, where his uncle John Armbruster lived. Armbruster was the lighthouse keeper at Outer Island, one of twenty-two islands in the Apostle Islands
