Split Rock Lighthouse has long been a tourist attraction.

It has been 36,525 days without a shipwreck, thanks to the Split Rock Lighthouse. To celebrate the 100 years of Split Rock Lighthouse this summer, events and activities will keep visitors coming back for more.

The Historical Society will celebrate the illustrious history of Split Rock and its visitors with celebrations and lightings on the first Friday of every month starting in May. There will also be programs with music by Bill and Kate Isles June 4 and Charlie Maguire July 2.

From May 15 to Oct. 15 visitors can take a tour of the grounds and learn about the lighthouse. Along with the tours and programs there are also actors dressed in 1920s apparel giving tourists as close to the real life experience as possible.

Guests have been leaving their mark on the lighthouse since it first opened in 1910 as a working lighthouse. And it didn’t take long for visitors to come because the first keeper of the lighthouse, Orren “Pete” Young, noted in his log just six weeks after the first light that “party of visitors” came to see the new attraction.

Numbers increased steadily throughout the years and by the late 1930s keeper Franklin J. Covell estimated nearly 100,000 visitors came per year. Today visitors are still drawn to Split Rock Lighthouse, with an estimated 120,000 in annual attendance.

Not long after it was first opened in 1910, the keepers started using guest visitor log books so they could estimate total visitation for the Coast Guard. Until a highway was built in 1924, visitors traveled to the lighthouse over the water, but with the highway’s ease of access the attendance steadily increased.

The lighthouse that visitors travel all over the globe to visit started out with a modest idea. Shipwrecks in 1905 caused by a strong gale motivated the U.S. government to spend $75,000 constructing the lighthouse.