The Kimberly Point Lighthouse Survived the Tornado
After Fresh Air Park, with the evening light getting long, I drove up to Kimberly Point. Of all the places the tornado had come near that day, this was the one I most wanted to see with my own eyes.
If you have spent any time in Neenah, you know Kimberly Point. It sits right at the tip of the land where Lake Winnebago empties into the Fox River, and it has a lighthouse. Helen Kimberly Stuart gave the land to the city in 1929, and the park is named for her family, the same Kimberlys behind Kimberly-Clark, which got its start right here in Neenah. Her brother, J.C. Kimberly, put up the $7,500 for the lighthouse in the 1940s. A contractor from Oshkosh built it, the light first guided boats into the Neenah harbor in 1945, and it was later raised to the 49 feet it stands at today. It is on the National Register of Historic Places now. It is also one of the most photographed spots in town, the kind of place just about everyone who grew up here has a picture of somewhere.
Here is the good news, and I want to lead with it: the lighthouse is fine. It is standing there exactly the way it always has, white and straight, not a mark on it. After everything else I had seen that day, that mattered more than I expected.
The trees are another story. The big old ones ringing the point took it hard. Some were snapped off partway up, some were split down the middle, and at least one had come all the way down across the road. The parking lot and the paths were carpeted in green, whole limbs and leaves everywhere. I watched somebody pick their way through it on a bike. A tree about the size of a car had come down right next to a Wrong Way sign, which felt about right for the kind of day it had been.
I shot a short video walking the point, so you can see the whole scene, the lighthouse in one direction and the wreckage in the other.
That lighthouse has been showing boats the way into this harbor since 1945. It has stood through however many storms have blown across Lake Winnebago in the eighty years since, and it stood through this one too. The trees around it will take longer, and some of them are not coming back. But they will get cleaned up, new ones will go in, and the light will still be out there on the point doing the one thing it has always done. That is a good thing to be able to say tonight.
