The Port Austin Reef Light is located in Lake Huron approximately 2½ miles north of the Port Austin Harbor and Port Austin, Michigan. The station was established and first lit in 1878 and after a devastating fire, modified in 1899. It is still operational and acts as an automated beacon to this day.

The Port Austin Area Historical Society operates the Port Austin History Center. The museum, housed in a 1904 Maccabee Society building, presents the history of Port Austin, Grindstone City, and Port Crescent. The grounds feature other historic buildings.

The Pointe aux Barques keeper's house and tower have been completely restored and contain historical artifacts from a bygone era. The Museum is open to the public free of charge and donations are kindly appreciated to help fund the Society's projects.

The Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse and Lifesaving Station aided mariners for over a century, beginning in 1847. That year the U.S. Lighthouse Service built the first lighthouse on this site to mark the turning point of Lake Huron into Saginaw Bay and to warn of shallow waters.

During the mid-1850s the firm of R. B. Hubbard and Company, which included Connecticut-born entrepreneurs Langdon Hubbard, his brother Watson, and cousin Rollin B., built a steam-powered sawmill on Willow Creek. The company town they developed was named Huron City in 1861.

Around 1857 Charles G. Learned purchased several thousand acres of pine land in Michigan’s Thumb area. With profits from his lumbering and farming enterprises, Learned enlarged and updated this house in the French Second Empire style. In the 1860s Ohio congressman, later president, James A. Garfield, a family friend, was a frequent guest here.