Point Fermin Light, Wooden lighthouse in San Pedro, Los Angeles, United States.
Point Fermin Light is a wooden lighthouse in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles, built from California redwood and standing about 30 feet (9 meters) tall. It sits inside a small coastal park overlooking the Pacific and is one of the few surviving wooden lighthouses on the West Coast.
The lighthouse was built in 1874 by architect Paul J. Pelz and served as a navigational aid for ships along the Southern California coast for decades. Operations stopped in 1942 when the US Navy ordered coastal blackouts during World War II.
The lighthouse takes its name from Father Fermín de Lasuén, a Franciscan friar who founded several missions along the California coast. His name lives on at this spot, giving visitors a tangible link to the Spanish mission era that shaped much of Southern California.
The lighthouse is located inside Point Fermin Park in San Pedro, and it is easy to reach by car or on foot from the surrounding neighborhood. Guided tours of the interior run on a regular basis, but group sizes are limited so arriving early is a good idea.
In its early years, the lighthouse was tended by two sisters, Mary and Ella Smith, who were among the first women to serve as lighthouse keepers on the West Coast. The light they operated alternated between red and white signals, a feature that was relatively rare for a lighthouse of this size at the time.
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