The United States of America is a federal union of 50 states and a capital district. This page describes lights established on a number of remote islands in the north central Pacific Ocean. These islands are classified as unincorporated U.S. territories under the direct control of the federal government. In 1856 the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act authorizing U.S. citizens to take possesion of uninhabited oceanic islands anywhere in the world for the purpose of mining guano for fertilizer. More than 100 islands were occupied at various times in the second half of the 19th century. Nearly all these territorial claims have lapsed or been officially abandoned but several islands have remained permanently in U.S. possession, including Navassa Island in the Caribbean and a number of small islands in the North Pacific Ocean west and south of Hawaii. Among the guano islands are several in the Phoenix Islands and Line Islands, located near the Equator in the central Pacific Ocean. In the 1930s the U.S. government decided to send American settlers to several of these islands to establish U.S. sovereignty more clearly in the face of Japanese imperial expansion. Small lighthouses were built as part of five settlements, including the three described on this page. The other two were on Kanton (Canton) Island and Enderbury Island but the U.S. claims to these islands were ceded to the new nation of Kiribati in the 1979 Treaty of Tarawa. These tiny colonies were short lived; all the settlers were withdrawn in 1942 after Kanton, Baker and Howland Islands were strafed by Japanese ships and planes based at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands (also now in Kiribati). All the islands have been uninhabited ever since. In 2009 the atolls and coral islands of Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Wake, Johnston, and Palmyra and the Kingman Reef were incorporated into the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. These same islands, plus Navassa Island in the Caribbean Sea and the Midway Islands in the Hawaiian chain, are also called the United States Minor Outlying Islands, a statistical category invented by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ARLHS numbers are from the ARLHS World List of Lights. Admiralty numbers are from volumes G and M of the Admiralty List of Lights & Fog Signals. U.S. NGA List numbers are from Publication 111.
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Information available on lost lighthouses:
Notable faux lighthouses:
Adjoining pages: North: Hawaii | South: Kiribati
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Posted August 28, 2005. Checked and revised September 18, 2024. Lighthouses: 5. Site copyright 2024. Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.