Elizabeth Whitney Williams

Born on Mackinac Island in 1844, Elizabeth Whitney Williams grew up around the northern Lake Michigan shoreline, including Beaver Island. She later became one of the longest-serving lighthouse keepers in the United States, tending lights for 41 years at Beaver Island Harbor and then at Little Traverse Light near Harbor Springs.

Her writing is closely tied to that life on the water. In 1905 she published A Child of the Sea and Life Among the Mormons on Beaver Island, a memoir that blends personal history with eyewitness recollections of everyday life in the region and of the turbulent Strangite Mormon community on Beaver Island. The book remains a valued firsthand account of nineteenth-century Great Lakes life.

Williams died in 1938 in Charlevoix, Michigan. Today she is remembered both for her steady, demanding work as a lighthouse keeper and for preserving an unusual corner of Midwestern history in her own clear voice.