Marine Museum and Historic Lighthouse

The Port Burwell lighthouse is a square white wooden tower 19 metres tall, standing at the head of Robinson Street where it meets the lake. It is one of the oldest wooden lighthouses in Canada and still has its original 1840 framing, repaired and re-clapboarded but never replaced. You can climb the seven flights of internal stairs to the lantern room for a view across the harbour and the Lake Erie shore.

The Marine Museum next door fills three rooms with the history of Great Lakes shipping out of Port Burwell — log timbers, schooner models, a working steam engine from a Lake Erie freighter, photographs of the wrecks that litter the lake bed. It is small, lovingly assembled, and worth the modest entry fee.

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The lighthouse was built in 1840 from local white pine and is the oldest wooden lighthouse still standing on the Great Lakes. Its keeper's diary from the winter of 1854 — a year of unusual ice that left Lake Erie sealed for four months — is on display inside, complete with the entry recording the keeper rowing ten kilometres across the frozen lake to fetch flour.

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