When Vermilion became a village in 1837, its people had already built their own navigational aid at the river mouth with wooden stakes topped by oil-burning beacons. In 1840, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged the river and built two piers at its mouth, constricting the water to prevent flooding and creating the depth boats needed to enter and leave the harbor, helping begin the golden age of shipbuilding on the Vermilion River. A new wooden lighthouse was placed on the western pier in 1847, and a keeper from the village lit its lamp each evening and quenched it each morning. Early lighthouses there used whale oil, then shifted to lard oil and later kerosene after the rising cost of whale oil, and a small oil-storage building was erected on the pier in 1906. By 1876 the lighthouse was dilapidated, so Congress appropriated $3,000 for an iron lighthouse made from obsolete cannons melted down after the Battle of Fort Sumter; towed to Vermilion on barges along the Erie Canal, it was erected in 1877 with both an oil lantern and a Fresnel lens and stood at the harbor entrance for 52 years. Residents later regarded it with deep affection, but in 1929, after Ted and Ernest Wakefield noticed it was leaning, the Corps of Engineers removed it and replaced it with a skeletal tower. In 1935 the old iron lighthouse was re-installed at Charity Shoal on Lake Ontario in New York, where it remains privately owned. Ted Wakefield later helped lead a volunteer effort to fund a replacement, and a 34-foot-tall lighthouse was erected in 1991 at the foot of Main Street, wired for electricity to power an incandescent light in a Fresnel lens and sanctioned by the U.S. Coast Guard as a navigational aid. The light went dark in 2012 when the Fresnel lens was removed and later placed in a museum in Toledo, but local residents raised $40,000 for a new lens, which was installed in 2016, and the lighthouse was lit once again.