Split Rock Lighthouse shines with new tours, Indigenous history exhibit

It’s a sunny August Saturday at Split Rock Lighthouse historical site in northern Minnesota on the shore of Lake Superior. There’s a line out the lighthouse door of visitors eager to catch a glimpse of the ring-shaped fresnel lens, dozens of people perusing T-shirts and puzzles in the gift shop and crowds gathered on the shore to snap photos of the iconic yellow brick tower standing on a 130-foot cliff face. 

It’s one of the Minnesota Historical Society’s most frequently visited sites, and the adjoining state park is in the top five most visited. But even if you’ve been here before, there are new reasons to return. Minnesota’s iconic North Shore lighthouse has transformed itself over the last few years since the pandemic. 

A recent trip found a new walking tour and an important new exhibit on the history of the Native American people who were there long before the 114-year-old tower. 

“The lighthouse is just a blip of the history that is there, and that there's so much more that has happened on that great lake that we need to think about all the different people who have passed through,” said Rita Walaszek Arndt, who works in the Minnesota Historical Society’s Native American Initiatives Department and helped overhaul Split Rock’s historical presentation on the region’s Native people.

The exhibit boasts a map illustrating Dakota and Ojibwe migration around Lake Superior going back hundreds of years and a new video featuring voices from leaders in the Grand Portage, Fond du Lac and Red Cliff tribes. 

“I was making sure, yes, we're going to talk about what water means to Ojibwe people and what the land means. But I also want to talk about how the treaties have impacted our relationship with the water and land,” Walaszek Arndt said. “The main points I want to get across is that, one, we are still here and that we have always valued the space that everybody's currently standing in, and here's how we've been taking care of it since time immemorial.”

Visitors to the site can now sign up for a new, hourlong tour of lesser-known corners of the historic lighthouse site. The “Conquering the Cliff” tour takes visitors through the history of how the lighthouse was built more than a century ago, before a highway connected the cliff to the rest of the world. 

Ed Maki, who’s been working at Split Rock for more than 40 years, is one of the staff members who leads the tour and attempts to immerse visitors in the site’s history.

“Think of no fencing, think of a wooden platform built out over the cliff — would you want to stand there?” Maki told visitors during a recent tour. “Eventually 310 tons of building materials would come up over the side.”

Hayes Scriven, who lives on site and has been Split Rock’s managing director since 2019, hopes the work done to update the exhibit and tours will give everyone who visits something of what they’re looking for. 

“My goal has been to let people experience the site in a different way that they haven't been able to experience it before. And I want them to experience it at their own pace, at their own level.”

The lighthouse historic site keeps regular hours from April to October and is adding a photography tour to its lineup in September.

Correction (Sept. 3, 2024): An earlier version of this story misstated the name of a new Split Rock Lighthouse tour. That name has been corrected.