Mimi Herrington of Pointe aux Barques Maritime Museum

Mimi Herrington grew up in Bad Axe and Port Austin, picnicking with family at the Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse, before her career took her to Chicago and Fairfield, Connecticut as an environmental lawyer and middle school teacher. But the pull of Huron County and its miles of shoreline brought her back to serve as director of the Bad Axe library from 2003-2021 and kept her there after retirement as a dedicated volunteer in historic preservation.

Now, as president of the Pointe aux Barques Maritime Museum, she is leading efforts to open the former life-saving station (active 1876 to 1937) as a museum, improve the existing museum in the former lighthouse keeper’s house and preserve the majestic lighthouse for posterity. These efforts have been supported by Michigan Lighthouse Assistance Program grants. Since 2000, the State Historic Preservation Office has awarded matching grants annually from the revenue generated by the sales of the Save Our Lights fundraising license plate. Grants were made to the Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse Society ($30,900 in 2004) and Huron County Road Commission ($16,000 in 2010 and $26,633 in 2014) to support restoration and preservation of structures at Pointe aux Barques.

I was born and raised in Bad Axe, the county seat of Huron County.  It was an idyllic childhood growing up in a small town. My family spent our summers in Port Austin, a short commute away. It was heaven living on Lake Huron, swimming, boating and sailing, and always bittersweet when Labor Day rolled around and we returned to Bad Axe for school.

After graduating in 1977, I went to the University of Michigan where I majored in French, then enrolled in law school and obtained my J.D. in 1985. I worked as an associate at Sidley & Austin in Chicago in environmental law, then in 1991 for General Electric Co. in Fairfield, Connecticut on wastewater and chemical management issues. I decided to make a career change in 1998 and entered a fast-track teacher certification program in Chicago. Over the next five years, I taught fifth, seventh and eighth grades in the Chicago Public Schools. It made me work harder than I had as an attorney.

Although I left Bad Axe after high school, I returned home to visit family as often as I could. Coming back to Huron County was a good respite from busy city life. By the early 2000s, my husband and I were thinking about returning permanently. I assumed I would seek a job teaching middle school. However, in 2003, the director of the Bad Axe Public Library was retiring. The more I thought about the position, the more interested I became. Luckily for me, I was selected and spent 18 years there. My proudest accomplishment was working with the Library Board and dedicated volunteers to establish a library district with a supported millage that restored stable funding. I retired from the Bad Axe Area District Library in 2021 and took up volunteer activities.

I’ve been familiar with the Pointe aux Barques lighthouse all my life, from picnicking there as a child to taking nieces and nephews and my husband’s kids to do the same. I’ve always loved the majesty of the light tower and, when we returned to Huron County, my husband and I wanted to get involved in the Lighthouse Society’s activities.  We’ve helped for many years at the annual Heritage Festival. When Huron County moved the life-saving station back to Lighthouse Park in 2017, our interest was really piqued, and we’ve been focusing our efforts on the restoration ever since.

Much of my time has been spent working to get the 1876 Pointe aux Barques life-saving station restored and opened as a museum. The U.S. Life-Saving Service—the precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard—employed surfmen who got into oversized rowboats during the worst weather imaginable to save people off sinking ships. They operated on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as across the Great Lakes, with over 35 stations in Michigan. Few remain or are accessible to the public, so we are excited at the prospect of being able to open the station house. We just need $1.3 million to achieve our goal!

As president of the Pointe aux Barques Maritime Museum, I’m also involved in other aspects of our operation, including our Assistant Keeper program. At Pointe aux Barques, the 1857 light tower has an attached keeper’s house which today serves as a museum.  Another house, built in 1908, served as the assistant keeper’s quarters and, since 2021, provides lodging for guests to spend a week at the lighthouse and help us as docents in the museum. The house has been beautifully restored and provides magnificent views of Lake Huron.

We have also spent the last two years updating our lighthouse museum.  We reorganized our exhibits to clearly delineate between lighthouse history, life-saving station history and area shipwrecks.  We now have an interactive electronic shipwreck display that shows over 75 wrecks in the Thumb Bottomland Preserve.  Just this season, we have also introduced another interactive display about the ten keepers who served from 1848-1939 at the lighthouse.

We have developed a great working relationship with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) on our life-saving station restoration efforts. SHPO has been very supportive of our work and conducted three insightful reviews of our Historic Structure Report draft. It has also been very willing to work with us to identify possible funding sources.

The advice we would give to others preparing a Historic Structure Report would be to hire both an architectural firm and an historical research firm to manage the dual aspects of architectural drawings and research into the history of the building. Historical researchers are expert at finding documents in the National Archives and can find other sources of information about your building that you would never be aware of.

Looking forward, I would like to quickly raise the funds needed to restore the Pointe aux Barques life-saving station so that we can open it as the only museum of its life-saving station design on the Great Lakes, and someday to build a visitor center with an archive of our lighthouse and life-saving station history. I hope that, once the life-saving station is restored, we will attract even more visitors to Pointe aux Barques.

Huron County has 90 miles of shoreline that varies from beautiful sandy dunes and beaches to dramatic rocky bluffs.  Being located on the shore of Lake Huron with all of its changing weather and seasons and incredible maritime history is a privilege and a treat.  Further inland, we have miles of farms that produce everything from sugar beets to sweet corn to beans of all kinds. The sunsets and sunrises are breathtaking. It is a wonderful place to live.