Built: 1871

Type: 2 Story Cottage with light on top

Height: 40 feet

Status: Active - Restored as a privately maintained aid to navigation Dec 7, 1996

Location: Newport

Decommisioned: 1874

Elevation: 161 feet

Lens: Fifth order Fresnel - Currently 250 mm acrylic lens on loan until another fifth order fresnel lens becomes available

Keepers: Charles H Peirce

Notes: The Yaquina Bay lighthouse began in 1871 when Yaquina Bay was a bustling port, the most populated along the West Coast between San Francisco and the Puget Sound. The Lighthouse Board determined there was a need for a lighthouse to guide traffic into the bay and in April 1871, 36 acres were purchased at the north entrance of the bay from Lester and Sophrina Baldwin, original homesteaders, for $500 in gold.
The lighthouse was quickly built - the tower and dwelling by Ben Simpson of Newport, Oregon, the lantern room by Joseph Bien of San Francisco. Its beacon, produced by a whale oil lamp within a fifth-order Fresnel lens, shown for the first time on November 3, 1871.
Charles H. Peirce, a former Civil War captain in the Union army, brought his wife and six children with him when he started to serve as headkeeper at Yaquina Bay Lighthouse. The Peirce's ninth child, Kate, was born on March 25, 1872, during the couples first year at the lighthouse. 
The completion of Yaquina Head Light in 1873 eliminated the need for the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse. On October 1, 1874, Captain Pierce extinguished the light, returning with his family to Cape Blanco. The fifth-order Fresnel lens was transferred to the Yerba Buena Lightstation in San Francisco Bay, where it was lit in 1875.
The US Coast Guard later used the lighthouse as lookout and living quarters from 1906 to 1915, before moving to their more central (white buildings an left) quarters just above the busy Newport bayfront. During this period, the Coast Guard also built the eight-story steel observation tower that continues to stand next to the original lighthouse. 
In 1931, the Oregon Highway Department began construction of the spectacular Yaquina Bay Bridge  which, upon completion in 1933, brought Highway 101 to the bluff beside the 50-year old Yaquina Bay Lighthouse.
The new bridge was one of a string of architectural and engineering masterpieces designed by Oregon's visionary bridge engineer, Conde McCullough. Most of these bridges are still in place today, and continue to carry traffic along Highway 101.
With the house deserted and in disrepair ghost stories abounded. Talk circulated of razing the structure and by 1946 it was scheduled for demolition. In 1948, the Lincoln County Historical Society was formed with the purpose of saving the lighthouse. For three years they worked to raise the money necessary to preserve the structure but to no avail. By 1951 preparations were again made to demolish it, until L.E. Warford, an Ohio industrialist raised in Oregon, joined the preservation campaign and spearheaded a movement to get national recognition for the structure. By 1955, plans for demolition were abandoned, and in 1956, the lighthouse was dedicated as a historical site under the jurisdiction of the Lincoln County Historical Society. For the next eighteen years it served as a county museum.
In 1974, the old deserted lighthouse was restored under the Historical Preservation Program and later accepted on the National Register of Historic Places. The Lincoln County Historical Society conferred the lighthouse to the Oregon State Parks Department.
The completion of the Yaquina Bay Bridge also created a bypass of the Newport bayfront district, and the city's commercial center moved to the top of the bluff, along Highway 101. The bayfront district entered a period of decline in the decades that followed, until tourism brought visitors to the historic storefronts in the 1970s.
On December 7, 1996, the light was re-lit, using a 250mm modern optic on loan from lighthouse historian James Gibbs. The light is an official U.S. Coast Guard privately maintained aid to navigation displaying a fixed white light visible for six miles.