To mark the centennial anniversary of Vashon’s most recognizable icon, the Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Museum will open a new exhibit this week featuring the Point Robinson Lighthouse.

The lighthouse and former Coast Guard station on the easternmost point of Maury Island has aided marine navigation in south Puget Sound for 100 years this year. With a permanent spot on the National Register of Historic Places, the lighthouse’s story is as rich as it is long, beginning when a fog signal was stationed at the point in 1885, then a lantern attached to a post two years later. The current lighthouse was built in 1915.

It should come as no surprise then that the museum’s homage to the island icon has been in the works for some time. Island artist and designer Jessica DeWire has been working on the exhibit for about a year, after local historian Bruce Haulman approached her to be the curator a couple of years ago.

Tapping DeWire for the project turned out to be fortuitous, as her mother, Elinor DeWire, is a lighthouse aficionado and historian, having authored at least 17 books and over 200 articles on lighthouses. Elinor is listed as co-curator of the exhibit.

“He (Haulman) didn’t know about my mom at first,” DeWire said with a smile. “She’s been a real wealth of information.”

Of course the scenic beauty of the white and red centenarian has not been overlooked — one section of the new exhibit boasts a collection of local artwork featuring the lighthouse on a wall titled “This Little Light of Ours.”

The exhibit also includes material on everything from the history of navigational aids — from early foghorns to current-day radar and GPS — to the optics switch from polished, leaded crystal lenses to plastic Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). There are also profiles of three lighthouse keepers who lived at the point before 1979, when the light became automated.

One of the keepers, Mark Suko, who kept the light from 1970 to 1972, will be at the exhibit opening during the First Friday Gallery Cruise. The son of Jens Pedersen Sr., who was the keeper from 1946 to 1954, will also be present.

“It will be wonderful to have them there,” DeWire said.

The third keeper profiled is Wyman Albee, who was stationed there from 1939 to 1944 and whose daughter Ila wrote the book “Children of the Lighthouse” about her and her brother’s adventures growing up at Point Robinson.

DeWire has painstakingly created replicas of stocked bookshelves from the time periods of various keepers to enhance the photos, timelines and artifacts in the exhibit. One of her biggest achievements, she said, has been creating an interactive map of all of the lighthouses in Puget Sound, where visitors will be able to see the signature light patterns and hear the unique foghorn sounds of each one.

“Each light has its own flash pattern and its own foghorn sound. No two in the Puget Sound are the same,” she said.

Rounding out the show is a section dedicated to the modern (post-1979) keepers, and most notably Captain Joe Wubbold, former Coast Guard captain and current president of the Keepers of Point Robinson.

Captain Joe, as he’s known to many, is the island’s go-to source for Point Robinson  information, including the history of the lighthouse’s original Fresnel lens (named for its developer, 19th century French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel), which still sits in the lantern room on a pedestal at the top of the tower, though these days a modern light source provides the actual flashing.

“It’s priceless,” he says of the old Fresnel lens. “So beautiful. There are 61 prisms in the Point Robinson lens, each individually cast of leaded crystal and polished by hand.”

And what about the LED light that replaced the lens in 2008?

“Cheap plastic. The LEDs do the job, but they are not beautiful like the lenses were.”

Despite the modernized light — and foghorn — now in place at Point Robinson, Wubbold still brags that in its 100 years of standing watch, there have never been any significant marine accidents in the area.

The importance of the place for Wubbold — and for Vashon — is clear in the new exhibit, which heritage museum board member Rose Edgecombe describes as “phenomenal.”

“I got a lot of help from the Coast Guard museum,” DeWire said, “and Captain Joe was a real mentor to me. My mom tells me she’s very proud.”