Marrowstone Point is a low, broad spit on the north shore of Marrowstone Island that marks the entrance to Port Townsend Bay from Admiralty Inlet, about 38 miles (61 km) north-northwest of Seattle and three miles (4.8 km) southeast of Port Townsend, Washington. Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy named the point on May 8, 1792, noting in his log that the cliff behind it was composed mostly of a whitish, hardened clay he called “marrow stone.”

In 1888 the U.S. Lighthouse Service placed a post lantern on Marrowstone Point to mark the shoals, rocks and heavy rip tides at the entrance to the main shipping channel into Puget Sound. The light was tended by a contract keeper who rowed out every few days to polish the lens, trim the wick and replenish the fuel. On February 3, 1918, after decades of complaints from mariners, the service replaced it with an electric white light mounted 28 feet (8.5 m) up on a small concrete fog-signal building, now considered the smallest lighthouse on Puget Sound.

The U.S. Coast Guard, which had taken over the light in 1939, transferred the 10-acre (4 ha) property in 1972 to the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, then part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for use as a fisheries research station, and a new wet laboratory was built in 1975. Between 1990 and 1992 the site underwent a $4 million renovation that added office and laboratory buildings. It later came under the U.S. Geological Survey, whose Marrowstone Marine Field Station now studies diseases affecting wild marine and migratory fish. Read more here and here. Explore more of Marrowstone Point and Admiralty Inlet here: