San Luis Obispo Light Station

Set on a hillside ridge near the entrance to San Luis Obispo Harbor, this light station was completed on June 30, 1890, to serve the busy port then called Port Harford. No lighthouse stood on the south-central coast across the 94 miles between Point Arguello and Piedras Blancas, and the 1888 sinking of the steamer Queen of the Pacific strengthened the case for a light. The complex includes a 40-foot square tower attached to a two-story wood-frame keeper's residence, a 1892 fog-signal building, a brick oil house, a privy, cisterns and a catch basin. Two 1961 duplexes and a heavily remodeled carpenter's shop do not contribute. Its Victorian Stick-style design is notable: of seven similar wood-frame lighthouses built in California between 1874 and 1892, only three survive, and this is the only one in the pure, simplified Stick style. Matching brackets on the fog-signal building and oil house unify the group visually.