California and the West : CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Coast Guard Is Beaming About 1909 Lighthouse : The refurbishment of the Point Cabrillo landmark is a shining example of history eclipsing technology.

POINT CABRILLO, Calif. — Here at the edge of the Lost Coast, where the fog swirls and the whales spout, the U.S. Coast Guard has turned its back on technology.

Back in the soulless 1970s and ‘80s, when budgets were shrinking and lighthouse keepers were retiring, the agency automated nearly all of the nation’s more than 600 lighthouses, decommissioning the historic Fresnel lenses crafted in Europe and replacing them with utilitarian airport-type beacons.

Cheap, efficient, and oh, so governmental. But this year nostalgia has won out over utility; a few miles north of Mendocino, beauty has bested the basics.

Just last month, during the 90th anniversary celebration for the Point Cabrillo lighthouse, the Coast Guard officially relighted the historic Fresnel lens--all polished brass and aging prisms--that had been painstakingly restored over a six-month period.

“It’s a step backward. It’s a first,” said Coast Guard Cmdr. Robert Durfey. But “it’s beautiful. . . . The lens itself is so much bigger than a beacon. It’s an impressive beam that sweeps the land.”

The restoration of the British-made Fresnel lens is the high point of a painstaking renovation of the Point Cabrillo light station, with its lighthouse, Craftsman-style lightkeepers’ houses and assorted outbuildings.

But the day before the relighting ceremony, the California Coastal Conservancy put on hold a five-year, $1-million plan to finish the restoration of the entire compound--one of very few such complete light stations in the country.

“There is a great deal of support for the restoration, but there is a fair amount of uncertainty about how that might be done and who will do it,” said Julia McIver, project manager for the California Coastal Conservancy. “At this moment, it is not certain that the restoration will be completed.”

Point Cabrillo has a lighthouse today because of a schooner called the Frolic, which was built in Baltimore in 1844 and spent five years running opium between Bombay and Canton.

On July 26, 1850, the Frolic was loaded with silks and pottery and bound for gold-crazy San Francisco when it ran aground just north of here and sank. The goods ended up with the Pomo Indians.

An enterprising lumberman named Henry “Honest Harry” Meiggs heard of the shipwreck and sent a crew to salvage what goods could be recovered. Instead of silks, the crew came back describing a region blanketed in giant redwoods.

By this time, most of the trees in the San Francisco area had been harvested to build the Gold Rush city from scratch. Delighted by news of the expanse of fresh lumber, Meiggs had an entire mill shipped from the East Coast around the tip of South America and assembled where Mendocino stands today. The Northern California lumber trade was born.

But there was a problem. The so-called doghole schooners, which transported lumber from the mills that soon cropped up in nearly every river mouth, regularly ran aground along the foggy, treacherous coastline. Between 1850 and 1909, more than 80 ships were lost along what is now the Mendocino County coast.

So the wealthy lumbermen petitioned Congress for a lighthouse, and on Aug. 5, 1908, construction began. The Point Cabrillo lighthouse--illuminated by an oil lamp and powered by a clockwork that had to be rewound by hand every 90 minutes--was lit for the first time on June 10, 1909.

Remote though Point Cabrillo is, progress did not pass it by. Electricity came in 1934, and the oil lamps were retired. In 1939, the Coast Guard took over. Eventually, the high-maintenance brass of the Fresnel lens was painted gray, and the lighthouse roof was stripped of its decorative rafters during repairs.

The airport beacon replaced the Fresnel in 1973, reducing maintenance to a quarterly bulb check. The Coast Guard eventually left the property, replaced by tenants such as the powder-post beetle and a fungus called cellar rot.

These days, the restored Fresnel lens sits atop the stripped-down lighthouse like the crown jewels on the brow of a peasant. It flashes every 10 seconds, the light from the 1,000-watt bulb made warm and golden as it passes through the polished prisms.

Thirteen months ago, the lens was painstakingly dismantled, covered with blankets and bubble wrap, crated and brought gingerly to the ground down a series of ladders. Every prism and screw was mapped and cataloged.

The gray paint was removed from each joint and screw head, with 280 hours of labor spent just putting penetrating oil on the screws to make sure they could be removed from the lens frame without doing any damage.

In November, the lantern, or decorative and protective housing for the lens, was removed from the lighthouse by hydraulic crane and put in a work shed. A roof was built over the shed so the lantern and the lens could be worked on throughout the winter.

Restoring the lighthouse was a more arduous task than first thought. For starters, the extent of damage from beetles and rot was greater than estimated. In addition, renovators could not use modern redwood to replace the original siding, which was a half-inch thick, a size no longer made today.

“We tried to mill it ourselves with currently available redwood, but the redwood is fairly fast-growing, the rings are widely spaced, so the siding would fall apart,” said Kevin Fletcher, restoration supervisor.

The difference speaks volumes about why old-growth redwood is so valuable. When the forests were untouched by loggers, the redwoods grew in a thick canopy that blocked sunlight. No light means slow growth, which gives the trees tight rings and dense, hard wood.

The solution: Workers trolled nearby Jackson State Forest for old-growth logs that had been cut decades ago but abandoned because of imperfections. They also used lumber from bridges built in the early part of the century on long-abandoned logging roads.

“No new trees have died to get this wood,” McIver said. “We won’t be able to do this for the rest of the station, but we managed to do it for the lighthouse.”

McIver said the lighthouse will be restored, but the rest of the station is in question because the California Coastal Conservancy board did not vote to release the necessary $1 million to restore the keepers’ cottages.

William Ahern, the conservancy’s executive officer, said his agency has the money and that the restoration will be performed. “Our board committed to making sure that the light station is restored,” he said. “What is in limbo is who’s going to manage it and who’s going to pay for it.”

The state Department of Parks and Recreation has expressed interest in managing the property. The earliest a decision could be made is December.

“The worst-case [scenario] is if the whole process was delayed,” says Fletcher. “The building would continue to deteriorate. The costs would continue to rise. Any decision is better than no decision with the shape the buildings are in.”