Squirrel Point Light Maine

On the Rockland 10 Tour:

Arrowsic Island, on the Kennebec River, was home to one of the first and largest colonial settlements in present-day Maine. By 1670 there were at least fifty families living in the area. One notable incident of record took place on the island in August of 1676, when a group of Indians sneaked past posted guards and massacred nine of the settler families.

Aerial view of Squirrel Point Lighthouse Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

As settlements grew in the area, the Kennebec became an increasingly important waterway. The Annual Report of the Lighthouse Board for 1892 noted the need for improved navigational aids on the river: “The Light-House Establishment maintains no lights or fog signals in the Kennebec, but the Kennebec Steam Company and the towboat companies have united for many years in maintaining lanterns hung on the buoys at turning points or other difficult places. The above facts establish, in the Board’s opinion, the necessity for and advisability of increasing the aids to navigation in the Kennebec River.”
Along with sites such as Perkins Island, the report recommended “at Squirrel Point a fixed red light from a lens lantern, with a white sector to the southward, at an estimated cost of $4,650.” Funding was appropriated in 1895 for lighting the Kennebec River, and the Squirrel Point Lighthouse, located on the southwest tip of Arrowsic Island, was finished in 1898. The 1898 Annual Report briefly describes the completed work: “The buildings consist of a frame tower, frame dwelling, and frame barn. The light is shown from a lens-lantern.” George Matthews was the first keeper at Squirrel Point serving from 1898 to 1912, after transferring to the station from Whitehead Lighthouse.
Subsequent annual reports noted improvements made at Squirrel Point: “A gallery with railing was built around the lantern, a boat slip and about 70 running feet of plank walks were built, and a concrete floor was laid in the cellar of the dwelling” (1899). “The act approved June 6, 1900, appropriated $1,620, to be applied in part to the erection of a boathouse at this station. Plans for the work are being made. Various repairs were made” (1900). “The $1,620 appropriated June 6, 1900, was applied in part to building a boathouse and boat slip. The barn and fuel house were moved nearer the dwelling, and a boundary fence was built” (1901).

Squirrel Point Lighthouse Photograph courtesy Library of Congress

The 1902 report recorded: “The intensity of the light was increased by changing the lens from a lens-lantern to a fifth-order [Fresnel] lens; a bell house and weight shaft were built on the tower, and a 1,000 pound fog-bell was established. The ledge was blasted out and a drainpipe laid in it from the dwelling to high-water mark.” An oil house was also added in 1906.
For a while, the keeper at the Kennebec River Range Light Station was given the added responsibility of keeping the Squirrel Point Lighthouse, until it was finally automated in 1979. In 1993, Mike Trenholm, a semi-retired realtor of Yarmouth, ME, saw the lighthouse for the first time as he cruised past on a bird-watching expedition. The following day, Trenholm contacted the Coast Guard regarding the lighthouse, and within six months his persistence resulted in a lease on the property. After forming a non-profit group called Squirrel Point Light Associates, Trenholm was awarded the lighthouse by an Act of Congress in 1996. The association received the official deed for the property in 1998 under the conditions that it be “used for educational, historic, recreational, cultural and wildlife conservation programs for the general public” and “maintained in a manner consistent with the provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966."
Some people question how a person was able to obtain a lighthouse during a period when many Maine lighthouses were being included in the Maine Lights Program, but Trenholm notes that the deal “was up to the Coast Guard. They just put it on the floor of the Senate. There was nothing improper. It seems ridiculous that anybody thinks that there is."
A number of improvements were made to the property by Trenholm, but then in 1998 the property was reportedly placed on the market for an asking price of $500,000. The potential profiting from a lighthouse that was received at no cost sparked a quick and negative response. Trenholm claimed that the rumors of the sale were the result of “an overzealous Realtor” and maintained that he still intended to restore the property and use it for educational programs. This purported openness to the public, however, was not reflected in the “No Trespassing” signs that had recently been posted around the property.
At the time of the aborted sale in 1998, Trenholm said his health problems made the lighthouse seem like "a stone around my neck." After suffering further health setbacks, Trenholm tried to sell the property again in 2002 at a price of $375,000. In a letter sent to U.S. Senator Olympia Snow, local residents expressed their outrage regarding the sale. “We fear this Maine landmark is on the verge of being irreparably lost. We hope that you share our concern and take whatever action is necessary to ensure the preservation and continued access to the Squirrel Point Lighthouse, as well as prevent its inappropriate transfer for personal gain.” In his defense, Trenholm responded “The money I’m trying to get out of it is the money I’ve put into it. I’m not profiting. I’m just coming out of this about even.”
In April of 2003, Citizens for Squirrel Point, a Maine non-profit corporation, was formed to ensure that Squirrel Point Lighthouse was used and maintained in accordance with the covenants of its 1998 deed. Citing an October 2002 report by Maine’s State Historic Preservation Officer, the non-profit group filed a suit claiming the Squirrel Point Lighthouse was not being used or maintained in compliance with the deed and requesting that the property revert to the federal government. The Coast Guard was initially in favor of the property reverting to the government, but reversed its position in July of 2003 when the property went under contract for sale to retired Navy Rear Admiral Leonard, who intended to use the property as a seasonal residence.
In early 2005, U.S. Federal District Judge D. Brock Hornby sided with Citizens for Squirrel Point and ruled that ownership of the lighthouse and property should revert to the federal government. The lighthouse is expected to be offered through the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000 to a legitimate non-profit, or a state or local government entity.

Squirrel Point is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains an active aid to navigation. The optic is now a modern 250mm lens. The historic fifth-order Fresnel lens now resides at the museum at the Portland Head Lighthouse at Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The foghorn is automated, with one blast every ten seconds.

Ram Island Light Maine

On the Rockland 10 Tour 

When planning a trip to Ram Island Lighthouse, first make sure you are headed to the correct Ram Island. The name was a popular one, and there are twenty-one Ram Islands in Maine. The one that is home to Ram Island Lighthouse is located near Boothbay Harbor and formerly served as a place to quarantine rams to control sheep breeding. Ram Island Lighthouse is sometimes confused with Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse, a stone tower in Casco Bay that is visible from Portland Head Lighthouse.
On March 3, 1837, Congress appropriated $5,000 for a lighthouse on Ram Island, where it could mark the entrance to both Fisherman’s Island Passage, the eastern gateway to Boothbay Harbor, and the Damariscotta River. As a first step in investigating the need for this lighthouse, Captain Joseph Smith of the U.S. Navy solicited the opinions of local mariners. In response, twenty-two individuals signed a letter, dated May 15, 1837, that read in part, “We have for a long time had occasion to pass in and out said river, and think a light-house on said island would be of great service and utility to vessels of every kind coming in or going out of said Damariscotta river, or bound elsewhere.”

Ram Island Lighthouse before the red brick portion of the tower was painted white. Photograph courtesy U. S. Coast Guard

After visiting Ram Island himself, Captain Smith submitted a report to the president of the Board of Navy Commissioners on June 2, 1837 that included the following:

Any one much acquainted with nautical affairs, sailing into [Boothbay] harbor from the west, and from it through the eastern passage, will be struck with the advantages a light at the entrance of the eastern passage would give; and there is no point, in my opinion, so well adapted to this end as Ram island. But when the fact is stated, that from that island there are in view four light-houses, and within the compass of twelve or fifteen miles seven lights, viz: Seguin, Pond island, Hendrick's head, Burnt island, Pemaquid, Franklin island, and Monhegan, one of two conclusions seems to me inevitable: either that some of these lights are not judiciously located, or that no more are required in that vicinity. I am strongly inclined to the former conclusion.

Acting on Smith’s report, the Board of Navy Commissioners recommended the suspension of expenditures for Ram Island Lighthouse pending a more general examination of the location of the area’s lighthouses. Local fishermen were thus forced to take the lighting of Fisherman’s Island Passage into their own hands. After the first volunteer keeper of this private light left the area, Aldis McKay, a young lobsterman who had benefited from the light, took charge of its maintenance. To improve the beacon, McKay enclosed it in a glassed-in box that he weighted with rocks, so it wouldn’t blow over.
Some say that there were and continue to be other less orthodox aids to navigation near Ram Island. The form of a ghostly “White Woman” is said to have saved many lives by appearing with a light to warn ships of danger. Some report seeing her in a burning boat or on a nearby reef, and even accompanied by lightning. But all describe her as a glowing form frantically waving them off the perilous rocks in the area. One captain reported hearing a fog whistle that saved him during a blizzard, even though there has never been such an aid on Ram Island. Another saw a burning boat that caused him to quickly change direction, however the next day, there was no sign of the vessel.
It was not until August 7, 1882, that Congress approved $25,000 for an official light station to guide mariners through Fisherman's Island Passage. The government had acquired four acres on Ram Island on July 15, 1837, when it first considered a lighthouse for the passage, so construction could start right away in the spring of 1883. A thirty-five-foot-tall cylindrical tower, which consisted of a substantial granite foundation, a brick central portion, and a cast-iron lantern containing an L. Sautter, fourth-order Fresnel lens, was built atop an offshore ledge and linked to the island with a foot-bridge. The station also included a keeper’s dwelling, fuel house, boathouse, and landing.
Samuel John Cavanor, who earned $540 annually and had previously served as an assistant keeper at Seguin Island, exhibited Ram Island Light for the first time on November 5, 1883. Before becoming a keeper, Cavanor served aboard the lighthouse tender Iris, where one day his leg was crushed by a buoy that was being hauled aboard. Cavanor’s leg had to be amputated, but that didn’t slow him down. William K. Larkin Jr., a lighthouse service machinist who regularly called at Ram Island, considered Sam to be the most active keeper “downeast,” in spite of his peg leg.
Ram Island Light was originally fixed white, with two red sectors indicating the clear passages in the vicinity, but on October 1, 1889, the colors were reversed so that white sectors marked the safe approaches and red warned of danger.
The station’s walkway was damaged on January 18, 1903, when the schooner Harriet W. Babson, returning from Newfoundland with a load of salt herring, grounded on Ram Island. The light was dark for the next few nights afterward, as Keeper Cavanor couldn’t reach the tower to refuel the lamp until the walkway was repaired.
Even the presence of a light station was not enough to curtail the destruction of ships near Ram Island during storms. Keeper Cavanor wrote on December 6, 1884 that after the schooner Mineola ran aground on nearby Squirrel Island, it was a “totle rack [sic]”; the schooner Garland went ashore in 1885, and nearly every year brought another disaster.
As for the station itself, a driving hailstorm, not long after the light had been established, smashed the lantern glass and put out the light, forcing Cavanor to plug the broken panes with newspaper to ensure the light stayed lit. Another storm swept away the station’s boat in 1885, while yet another in 1898 knocked the fog bell’s weight box from the tower. (A 1,000-pound fog bell had been suspended from the seaward face of the tower in 1897.) In 1900, the island’s only three trees were flattened during a gale.
The Cavanors purchased a home in Boothbay Harbor for their retirement, but before they could enjoy it, Keeper Cavanor died of a heart attack near the town’s Congregational Church on April 10, 1913. An article in the April 12 Boothbay Register carried the following on the Cavanors: “Probably no family in this vicinity were more attached to each other living all those years together on the little island surrounded by every comfort making them all and all to each other.”
Captain O. G. Reed, one of Boothbay Harbor’s old salts, took temporary charge of the light on Ram Island until Almon Mitchell was made keeper on May 10, 1913.
On July 7, 1939, with WWII looming for the United States, the Coast Guard took over the Lighthouse Service. At certain lighthouses, including Ram Island, when the civilian keeper went on leave, a coastguardsman would step in for him. “The salary in the Coast Guard in those days was $60 a month,” recalled Shirley Morong, wife of a coastguardsman. “Our house rent was $8 a month until we moved to a house that had electricity when it was raised to $12 with $2 paying the electric bill.”
Not long after Keeper Ralph Norwood transferred to Ram Island in early 1945, he rowed to the mainland with his two sons only to me welcomed by men armed with loaded shotguns. Turns out a skittish neighbor had called the police and FBI to report that German spies were coming ashore.
Ram Island Lighthouse was automated in 1965. A decade later, the Fresnel lens was stolen from the unattended lighthouse, but it was later recovered and is now on display at the Boothbay Regional Historical Society. A modern foghorn replaced the fog bell in 1972, and in 1977 the Coast Guard completed repairs at the station, which totaled $44,000. As part of the work in 1977, the badly deteriorated walkway leading to the tower was removed.
After automation, the station was offered to the town of Boothbay, but the expectation of large maintenance costs deterred the town from accepting the property. With no resident keeper, the station fell victim to vandalism and neglect. When the Coast Guard announced its decision to demolish the keeper's house in 1983, the Grand Banks Schooner Museum Trust stepped forward and leased the station. The Ram Island Preservation Society was formed and repairs began. The trust was granted ownership of the site in 1989 through the Maine Lights Program, while the Coast Guard retains responsibility for just the active navigational light itself. In 2002, the trust installed a new walkway to the tower, which, besides restoring the original look of the station, simplifies maintenance of the tower by the trust and servicing of the light by the Coast Guard.

Pond Island Light Maine

On the Rockland 10 tour:

Ten-acre Pond Island is located on the western side of the entrance to the Kennebec River. On the ocean side of the island, cliffs rise precipitously to a height of sixty feet or more, but the island tapers down to the west, where in calm seas it is possible to make a landing.

Pond Island Lighthouse circa 1885 Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

On March 31, 1821, Congress appropriated $10,500 for the construction of three lighthouses in Maine: on Cross Island near Machias, on Burnt Island near Boothbay Harbor, and on Pond Island at the mouth of the Kennebec River. The first Pond Island Lighthouse was a conical stone tower, likely similar to the Burnt Island Lighthouse that was constructed at the same time and remains today as the second oldest lighthouse in Maine. A light on Seguin Island, situated two miles farther offshore, had been constructed a quarter century earlier, but an additional beacon was needed to more adequately mark the mouth of the Kennebec River. The lights along the Kennebec River would not be erected until the end of the nineteenth century.
How Pond Island received its name is not known, but it is certainly not for any body of water found on the rocky mass. In 1823, Keeper S. L. Rogers petitioned the government for a well or cistern on the lighthouse: “I am the keeper of the Light House on Pond Island at the entrance to the Kennebec River and live on the same Island. I suffer great inconvenience on account of having no means to obtain fresh water but by transporting it from the mainland. It is usual I am told to have a well or Cistern on the Islands where Light Houses are placed.” The keeper’s plea produced the desired result as Stephen Pleasonton, overseer of the Lighthouse Establishment, directed that a cistern be built on the island if water could not be obtained by digging a well.
Water wasn’t the only resource lacking on Pond Island. In the 1880s, The New England Magazine was informed that the island provided sufficient pasturage for one cow, but upon closer observation, the magazine determined that the cow “must be content with two meals a day, or get an occasional donation from the meadows on the mainland.”
On more than one occasion, the keeper of the Pond Island Lighthouse solicited an increase in salary due to the isolated nature of his position. An official familiar with island lighthouses of Maine noted that although Pond Island offered no wood or cultivatable land, the keeper “has some advantage in entertaining the company that resort there in summer.” The keeper at Seguin Island did receive a $50 raise, but it was felt that the salary of the keeper at Pond Island could not be raised without raising the salaries of several other island lighthouse keepers.

Pond Island Lighthouse circa 1980 Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The present Pond Island Lighthouse, a twenty-foot-tall, brick tower, was built in 1855, at which time it was also outfitted with a fifth-order Fresnel lens. The cylindrical tower was attached to a one-and-a-half-story, wooden keeper’s dwelling by a work shed, and was similar in design to the Brown’s Head Lighthouse, which retains its dwelling today.
On September 8, 1869, a hurricane swept along the coast of Maine uprooting trees and causing a great deal of damage to various structures. A newspaper in Portland called it the severest storm to strike that city, and in Bath damages were estimated to be between $25,000 and $50,000 (in 1869 dollars). On Pond Island, the hurricane blew down the pyramidal fog-bell tower, damaging the striking machinery. Not surprisingly, the bell escaped uninjured. In 1890, a new 1,200-pound bronze bell was hung in place of the old steel bell that was badly corroded.
Besides the lighthouse, dwelling, and fog-bell tower, Pond Island was also equipped with a boathouse located on the shoreward side of the island. In 1885, a frame fuel-house was built on the island and a new wooden cistern with a capacity of about 1,000 gallons along with fourteen feet of rain pipes were supplied for the keeper’s dwelling. An oil house was added in 1905.

In the 1960s, the lighthouse was automated , and all of the station’s buildings save the brick tower were razed. Though many today consider this a tragic lost of historic structures, the removal of man’s footprint has allowed the island, which was transferred from the Coast Guard to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1973, to be re-established as a tern colony. Pond Island was home to a tern colony up until 1937, when an expanding gull population forced the terns from the island. With help from the National Audubon Society, a tern restoration effort was initiated on the island in 1996, through the removal of nesting gulls. Tern decoys were then deployed around the island, and tape recordings of a tern colony were played to entice nesting pairs of terns to the island. These efforts were rewarded in 1999 when the first common tern chick in more than sixty years was hatched on the island. In 2003, the first successful breeding pair of endangered roseate terns was documented on the island. The success of the restoration effort has attracted the attention of predatory great horned owls, which have limited tern productivity in recent years.

Doubling Point Range (Kennebec River) Lights

On the Rockport 10 tour:

The Doubling Point Range Lights (also known as the Kennebec River Range Lights) are located on Arrowsic Island at an important point in the Kennebec River. The lights are positioned at the end of a long, straight section of the river, and when mariners keep the two lights positioned one above the other, they are certain to be in the center of the channel. As a vessel coming upstream nears the lights, the river makes a 90° turn to the west, and then after a half mile another 90° to resume its course north. The Doubling Point Lighthouse marks the entrance to this tricky double bend in the river for vessels coming downstream.
The Annual Report of the Light House Board for 1892 announced the plans for the lights to mark the S-turn in the river: “At Doubling Point a red lens-lantern light, showing up and down the river, with a fog bell, and one-half mile east of the point, white range lights, not less than 500 feet apart, to mark the channel from Ram Island to Fiddlers Reach, at an estimated cost of $6,300.”

Aerial view of Doubling Point Range Lights Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Built in 1898, the two white octagonal wooden towers adorned with a red roof are of similar design. The front light is twenty-one feet tall with a focal plane of eighteen feet; the rear light tower (located 235 yards farther inland) is eighteen feet tall with a focal plane of thirty-three feet. The characteristic of both lights, which show through a small window in the towers, is a continuous quick white flash. A two-story wooden keeper’s dwelling and a barn were also built in 1898, along with raised wooden walkways to link the towers to the dwelling. Within the next five years, a boathouse and brick oil house were also added.
In 1912, the Ransom B. Fuller, a passenger steamer that operated between Boston and Bath, ran aground in foggy conditions just west of the Doubling Point Range Lights. The following year, a 1,200-pound fog bell was installed in a pyramid-shaped wooden tower near the site of the mishap to prevent similar occurrences. The tower is known as the Fiddler’s Reach fog signal. The Coast Guard removed the bell in 1972, and it is now on display at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.
The sharp bend in the river where the Doubling Point Range Lights are located can be very difficult for ships over 600 feet in length to navigate safely. Newly commissioned vessels leaving nearby Bath Iron Works often fall into this category, and passage through the area is a good first test for a ship’s rudders, not to mention the pilot’s skills.
One of the best-known keepers at the Range Lights was a retired deep sea skipper named Captain Harry L. Nye, who retired from the sea in the 1920s to become a lighthouse keeper, first at Seguin Point and then at Doubling Point. During his tenure, Nye rescued a number of boats that became stranded on the rocks near the lights.

Doorknob on front range light Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

His most spectacular rescue came on December 28, 1928. Four young men were playing on large ice floes in the Sasanoa River, about a mile upstream near the city of Bath, when the one that they were on broke loose. Carried by a strong tide, the ice floe moved quickly downriver toward the open sea with the four boys on top of it. Nye managed to get his boat out in the river, intercept the ice floe, and rescue the four boys.
Keeper H.L. Kilton was profiled in an article in the August 1948 issue of the Maine Coast Fisherman. The article stated: “Mr. Kilton lives, with his wife, at the Range Lights dwelling, the Doubling Point dwellings having been sold off some years ago. From there he attends to the two octagonal towers known as the range lights, at the lower end of Fiddler’s Reach in the Kennebec. Up the reach some 1075 feet and reached by two bridges on a path along the ledges is the Fiddler’s Reach fog signal, and at the upper end of the reach, a half mile from the dwelling is the Doubling Point lighthouse and bell.”
“Mr. Kilton has been on the station for three years, being a civilian keeper, and thoroughly enjoys it. The whole place was in apple-pie order with a neatly-cut lawn sloping off to an eye-catching view down the Kennebec. He doesn’t seem to be worried about slogging over to Fiddler’s Reach fog signal to wind his bell every four hours in fog and snow. As for the trip to Doubling Point when things go wrong in the winter - he snowshoes.”
“Although situated on Arrowsic Island and within reach of power lines, the station generates its own electricity with an 11 volt Kohler power system charging into a bank of batteries.”
Dan and Karen McLean first met in 1978 when they were both serving in the Coast Guard at Gloucester, MA. Two years later, they married, which meant they could no longer serve in the same unit. Dan left the Coast Guard in 1980, and Karen was going to do the same when her four-year term ended in 1982. However, the Coast Guard was reluctant to see her leave and offered her the Doubling Point Range Lights, where she would live and oversee the range lights as well as the lights and fog signals at Doubling Point and Squirrel Point.
The McLeans relocated to the station in February 1982. Getting to Squirrel Point was no simple chore, involving a short drive and a one-mile hike. In winter, the couple often used cross-country skis to reach the station. In 1984, Dan re-enlisted in the Coast Guard and was assigned to Station Boothbay Harbor. Two children were born to the McLeans while Karen was in charge of the station, then in 1987, Dan took over as officer-in-charge and Karen was assigned to Group South Portland.

In 1998, under the Maine Lights Program, the Doubling Point Range Lights became the property of a nonprofit group called The Range Light Keepers. The group is working to restore the fog bell tower and replace the bell and the "clockworks" that drove the striker. The Coast Guard has provided a bell, similar to the one used at the tower, that will be eventually be hung from the new bell beam. In the meantime, the bell is displayed at the Arrowsic Town Hall

Hendrix Head Light Maine

Another of the Rockport 10

Hendricks Head Lighthouse was erected on the western side of Southport Island in 1829 by Joseph Berry to guide vessels up the Sheepscot River to the shipbuilding center at Wiscasset Harbor. The original lighthouse, built at a cost of $2,662, consisted of a rectangular stone dwelling with a wooden octagonal tower protruding from one end of its pitched roof. The lantern room was of the old birdcage design, featuring a multitude of small glass panes separated by wide metal muntins. John Upham first lit the tower’s lamps on December 1, 1829.

Hendricks Head Lighthouse with bell tower Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The Annual Report of the Lighthouse Board for 1875 noted that the Hendricks Head Lighthouse “is now in such an advanced state of dilapidation and decay that it has become uninhabitable, and new buildings are being erected, to be paid for from the general appropriation for repairs of light-houses.” The new forty-foot-tall tower was square, built of brick, and was detached from the one-and-a-half-story keeper’s dwelling which measured twenty-two by thirty-one feet. Other buildings at the station included a boathouse and barn. The Annual Report for 1891 recorded that a pyramidal skeleton frame tower, built of yellow pine, had recently been bolted to the ledge near the dwelling to house a 1,200-pound bell and striking machinery. A brick oil house was added a few years later.
Jaruel Marr was appointed keeper of the Hendricks Head Lighthouse in 1866 to compensate him in part for injuries he sustained while fighting in the Civil War. Jaruel had walked sixty miles to Portland to enlist in the Union Army, leaving his wife Catherine and three children behind. During the conflict, he was wounded and incarcerated in a Confederate prison in Virginia, where he was nursed back to health by a fellow-prisoner and Union Army doctor named Wolcott. To honor the doctor, Jaruel and his wife named their next child Wolcott.
It was purportedly during the service of Jaruel and Catherine Marr that the now controversial story of the “Baby That Washed Ashore” occurred. The story goes that during a blinding snowstorm around 1870, a schooner ran aground on a rocky ledge just seaward of the lighthouse. Unable to launch their dory due to the turbulent waters crashing on the shore, the keeper and his wife watched helplessly as the panicked crew clamored up the rigging of the doomed vessel, which was soon broken to pieces by the towering waves.
In the off chance that someone had survived the wreck, the keeper built a bonfire on the shore and diligently scanned the waters for signs of life. An hour or so after darkness fell, the keeper noticed a bundle being buffeted towards the lighthouse. Wading into the icy waters, the keeper retrieved what turned out to be a pair of feather mattresses protectively lashed around a box. Using his sheath knife, he quickly cut the ropes and discovered a terrified, screaming baby girl inside the box along with a note committing the infant into God’s hands.
In 1997, Barbara Rumsey of the Boothbay Region Historical Society wrote a two-part article for the Boothbay Register in an attempt to debunk this popular story that was printed by Edward Rowe Snow’s in his 1945 work, Famous Lighthouses of New England. Though Rumsey’s logic is quite convincing, descendents of Jaruel and Catherine Marr claim that the story is true and that the name of the baby girl, later adopted by a doctor and his wife who were summer residents of the area, was Seaborn.

Hendricks Head Lighthouse Photograph courtesy Library of Congress

Keeper Jaruel Marr and his family moved into the new keeper’s dwelling on September 30, 1875 and were thrilled with their new cook stove. All three of the Marr’s sons that reached adulthood followed in their father’s footsteps as lightkeepers. The two older sons served at Pemaquid Point and Portland Breakwater Light, while the youngest son, Wolcott, served at Cape Elizabeth and the Cuckolds before returning to Hendricks Head to replace his retiring father. On July 1, 1855, Wolcott Marr recorded the following in the Hendricks Head logbook: “Arrived at this station at 2 PM to relieve Mr. Jaruel Marr, who has been keeper here for the past 29 years.”
Merle Brugess, grandson of Wolcott Marr, gave the following account of his grandfather’s life at Hendricks Head.

The Lighthouse Keeper was responsible for all maintenance of buildings, grounds and equipment, as well as very frequent inspections of the lamp during the night and times of foul weather. My grandfather also found time to fish, lobster, dig for clams, garden and take summer visitors for boat rides around the nearby islands. In addition, in winter months he fashioned fine pieces of furniture, utensils, and tools... This was permissible as long as someone was on duty at the light. If needed, he could be summoned by my grandmother or uncles by ringing the bell, which could be heard for miles.

Furniture making must have run in the family, as a cabinet fashioned by Jaruel Marr is on display at the Hendricks Hill Museum in Southport. Wolcott served as keeper at Hendricks Head until 1930 when he passed away at the age of 61 due to acute bleeding of stomach ulcers.
Charles L. Knight was appointed keeper following the death of Wolcott Marr and served until the light was discontinued as a cost-savings measure in 1933. On a blustery night in 1932, Shep, a dog belonging to Charles’ son, caused quite a stir with its loud and persistent barking in the dwelling’s kitchen. When the dog was let out, it raced to the shoreline and continued its frantic barking. As nothing could be done to quiet the dog, Keeper Knight was convinced something was amiss offshore and decided to ring the fog bell as an alarm. Hearing the bell, the occupants of two nearby powerboats scanned the waters looking for anyone in distress. A couple adrift in a rowboat, having lost their oars, was soon located and rescued before they would have drifted out into the open sea. Recognizing the dog’s role in the rescue, the Anti-Vivisection Society of New York later awarded Shep a bronze medal.

After being discontinued, the lighthouse and surrounding land was sold to a Dr. William P. Browne of Connecticut in 1935. When electricity reached the area in 1951, Dr. Browne allowed the Coast Guard to automate and recommission the light. A ferocious winter storm in January of 1978 destroyed the boathouse along with the walkway that linked the dwelling to the fog-bell tower. In 1979, the tower’s fifth-order Fresnel lens was removed in favor of a modern optic. The lighthouse remained in the Browne family until 1991, when it was sold to Ben and Luanne Russell of Alabama. By 1993, the Russells had renovated all of the structures and created a pristine, picture-perfect light station.

Doubling Point Light Maine

Another of the 10 Light Rockland Cruise lights..

The first English-speaking settlement in what became the United States was attempted near the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1607, over a decade before the arrival of the Mayflower. The first recorded visit of a European to the region was by David Ingram, who claimed to have walked from Florida to New Brunswick and stopped near the Kennebec in 1582.
Though perhaps hard to imagine today, at one time the Kennebec River was a very busy waterway as evidenced by the river traffic report contained in the following Bath Daily Times story of July 1880.

Yesterday on the passenger steamer Henry Morrison, we counted 27 schooners at Bath, 13 more between Bath and Richmond, 55 more between Richmond and Hallowell, and two more docking at Augusta.

The U.S. Lighthouse Establishment had no lights on the river at that time. Instead, the Kennebec Steamboat Company and towboat companies maintained lights at turning points and other difficult places along the river. In 1892, the Lighthouse Board acknowledged the need to increase aids to navigation on the Kennebec and recommended the establishment of five official lights, including one at Doubling Point across from the historic shipbuilding town of Bath. Congress provided $17,000 for these lights in 1895.
A plot of land on Arrowsic Island was purchased on May 29, 1896 for the Doubling Point Lighthouse from Samuel S. Freeman, a local resident. The first station at Doubling Point, completed in 1898, consisted of a white octagonal wooden tower, a one and one-half story wooden L-shaped keeper’s dwelling, a fog bell tower, and a small barn. A year later, the tower was moved to its present offshore location, at the end of a 130-foot-long footbridge extending over a marsh and out into the Kennebec River. At the same time, the fog bell was mounted on the lighthouse tower. The tower’s original foundation is still visible on a rock ledge at the eastern edge of the lighthouse grounds.

Interior view of Doubling Point Lighthouse

was added using a $1,620 appropriation received the previous year, and the dwelling was moved closer to the tower being placed atop a new cellar. The old bell tower was also relocated and converted into a fuel house. A fifth-order Fresnel lens replaced the original lens lantern in 1902, and a brick oil house was built on the grounds in 1906.
There were only two on-site keepers during Doubling Point’s history: Merritt Pinkham (1889-1931) and Charles W. Allen (1931-1935). In 1935 the Lighthouse Service decided to manage the Doubling Point light from the nearby Doubling Point Range Light station, and the entire Doubling Point station grounds (except for the lighthouse tower) were sold to a private party for $2,200.
In the mid-1970s a 300mm modern optic replaced the Fresnel lens in the Doubling Point Lighthouse. The Fresnel lens is now on display at the Maine Lighthouse Museum in Rockland, Maine. The fog bell was removed in 1980, and its location is unknown. The catwalk was rebuilt in 1985, and in 1998, the Friends of Doubling Point Light, a non-profit corporation, was granted stewardship of the lighthouse.
For years ice floes had rushed down the Kennebec River each spring, crashing into the lighthouse’s granite-block foundation, which was held together by large metal “staples.” By 1999, the staples had long since rusted away, and the abuse had caused the foundation to become so unstable that it was feared the tower might soon topple into the river. The Friends of Doubling Point Light raised $25,000 from donations sent in from all over the country. This sum was matched by a grant from the Kurt Berliner Foundation of New York, permitting the Friends to hire a local construction company, Reed and Reed, to repair the foundation.
A small crowd, made up of supporters, a TV crew, and reports, assembled near the lighthouse on December 10th, 1999 to watch the removal of the tower. The five-ton structure was lifted skyward by a crane, and after dangling over the Kennebec River for a few moments as the crowd held its collective breath, the tower was carefully placed on a waiting barge without incident. The lighthouse was then towed upriver to its temporary home at the construction company’s yard in Woolwich, Maine. Working in frigid conditions, the contractors inserted stainless steel rods in the granite blocks, placed them back in position, and filled the foundation with concrete. A cap of red concrete, molded to resemble bricks, was placed atop the granite blocks, and on January 5th, 2000, the tower returned home.
The Doubling Point Lighthouse was automated in 1988 and remains an active aid to navigation, showing a flashing white light every four seconds. The lighthouse is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Cuckhold Light Maine

Another of the 10 light tour from Rockport 

In its Annual Report of 1891, the Lighthouse Board noted: “The Cuckolds consist of two rocky islets rising about 15 feet above high water in the westerly edge of the channel at Booth Bay. The Atlantic Coast Pilot says of them:

They are dangerous of approach on their southern side on account of the reefs in that direction, and the shoals also extend half a mile to the westward of the western rock, but the eastward side of the eastern rock is quite bold-to. The flood current sets right on these rocks.

They are much dreaded by mariners in thick weather and are a great peril to a large number of vessels, as it is estimated that from three to four thousand enter the bay for refuge in Booth Bay Harbor, which is well protected and is one of the most useful and important harbors of refuge on the coast of Maine. It is therefore recommended that a fog-signal be placed on the [easterly island of the] Cuckolds of sufficient range to warn vessels of their approach.”

Cuckolds Lighthouse under construction Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The cost for building a keeper’s dwelling, fog-signal house, and cistern, and for providing the necessary equipment was estimated to be $25,000. Congress appropriated the requested amount in March of 1891, and work on the structures began in January of 1892 at the Lighthouse Board’s shop in Portland and then continued on the actual site three months later.
As the rocky islet was washed by the sea in heavy storms, the station had to be built to withstand tremendous forces. The foundation for the fog signal building was thus constructed in the form of a semicircular granite pier, 36 feet in diameter and 12 feet high, whose hollow center would protect fresh-water cisterns and a storeroom. Atop the pier was placed the brick fog signal building of the same shape but of a smaller diameter. The curved portion of the fog signal building, positioned on the islet’s highest point, faced south so that the seas could flow around the building.
A substantial two-story double dwelling, built with a heavy pine frame and cross-gable dormers on the upper story, was bolted to the ledge in the lee of the fog signal building. The duplex was divided down the ridge of the main roofline into two identical apartments, each consisting of a kitchen, pantry, and sitting room on the ground floor and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second level. A bulkhead of hard pine, sixty feet long and twelve feet high, ran along the east side of the dwelling to protect it from the fury of a nor’easter. The boathouse and boat slip were built on the northwest side of the rock, which offered the most protection from the sea.
The materials, which included 105 yards of granite masonry, 60,000 bricks, 430 casks of cement, 100 tons of sand, 200 tons of broken stone and pebbles, 70,000 feet of lumber, and 3,400 pounds of wrought-iron work, was transported to the site primarily by the lighthouse tender Myrtle. The cost estimate proved to be spot-on, as the total expenditure was $24,750. The work was completed on November 16, 1892 and replaced a 57-foot-tall, wooden tripod that had marked the rocks since 1874.

Cuckolds Lighthouse circa 1975 Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The fog signal, built in duplicate, was a steam-powered Daboll fog trumpet. Around 1895, a 1,000-pound bell was installed at the station to be used while the air pressure was building. In 1902 “a modern apparatus operated by oil engines” replaced the “old hot-air fog-signal apparatus.”
The powerful fog signal was still insufficient to prevent all shipwrecks in the immediate vicinity, and the keepers at the Cuckolds put their lives at risk to offer assistance to those involved in a mishap. On November 20, 1896, Naval Secretary Commander George F. F. Wilde reported that “the Canadian Government has awarded to Mr. E. H. Pierce and Mr. C. E. Marr, Keepers of the Cuckholds, Me., fog-signal station, two silver watches, in recognition of their services in rescuing the Captain and crew of the Schooner Aurora of Harbourville, Nova Scotia, on 4 Jan’y, last; and that it is proposed to apply to Congress, at the next session, for permission to enable these persons to accept the testimonials offered.” The awards apparently took some time to work their way through Washington, as the two keepers did not receive the watches for over four years. At that time, Keeper Pierce was serving at Doubling Point Range and Keeper Marr was assigned to Pemaquid Point.
In 1907, a small tower, consisting of a workroom and lantern room, was built atop the conical fog signal building to provide a light to better server mariners. Macbeth-Evans Glass Company of Pittsburgh provided a revolving fourth-order Fresnel lens, inside which an incandescent oil vapor lamp was originally used. A radio transmitter was added to the station in 1956.
On January 27 and 28 of 1933, a nor’easter, the likes of which hadn’t been seen for forty years, struck the Cuckolds. The storm, known as the Great Gale, flooded the station with salt water that caused the batteries for the radio short circuit, thus severing all communication with the mainland. The head keeper provided the following account of the storm to the Courier-Gazette of Rockland, Maine.

The northeast gale of last weekend raised havoc at this station. The bulkhead was broken down by the seas and drive into the east side of the house, breaking out all windows but one on the lower floor and also broke through the thick wall in the dining room, flooding the rooms all day with water. The keepers made temporary shutters and put on the windows toward the night when the tide was low and they could work without being washed over by the seas. For two days and nights the heavy seas pounded the house and everything in the rooms were wet with salt water before they could be removed. Clapboards and shingles were torn from the buildings, the back porch washed away, the kitchen door broken and one end of the fuel house was smashed.

The Cuckolds Station was automated in 1974, and a few years later, due to problems with vandalism, the Coast Guard demolished the boathouse and keepers’ dwelling. Residents of nearby Cape Newagen watched in disbelief as the remains of the buildings were heaped up on the island and set afire. The fourth-order Fresnel lens was removed from the lighthouse in 1980 and is now on display at the Maine Lighthouse Museum in Rockland.
In 2004, the Cuckolds Lighthouse was deemed excess to the Coast Guard and offered to eligible entities under the provisions of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000. The Cuckolds Island Fog Signal and Light Station was formed and over the next two years developed a 542 page, two-volume application. In April of 2006, the organization was awarded the deed to the lighthouse.
During the summer of 2010, Pete Rawden was engaged to reconstruct the boathouse on the Cuckolds. Ironically, Pete had been part of a Coast Guard team tasked with removing the buildings on the Cuckolds thirty-three years earlier. After the boathouse was successfully rebuilt, the Cuckolds Council commenced work on the keeper's dwelling the following summer. Most of the exterior work on the dwelling was completed during 2011, and the interior work will be performed in 2012.

Perkins Island Light Maine

This was one of the 10 lights on the Rockport Light Tour..

During the 1800s the only navigational aids on the Kennebec River were those maintained by private companies. In its Annual Report of 1892, the Lighthouse Board moved to rectify this situation by including the following evidence of the importance of the waterway and its inherent navigational hazards.

There were 3,137 arrivals of vessels in this river during the year, not counting the steamers which ply daily. The steamers Kennebec, 1,652 tons, and Sagadahoc, 1,413 tons, made ninety-six round trips each from Gardiner to Boston. Other passenger steamers ply on the river from Bath to Augusta, Boothbay and Popham Beach, and intermediate places. The number of passengers carried was 232,150. Seventeen tugs were engaged on the river in towing. Thirty-nine vessels of 32,063 gross tons were built on the river, valued at $50 per gross ton, or say $1,603,150. The vessels arriving will average 450 tons. Some 24 feet draft can be carried to Thwings Point, 6 miles above Bath, 16 feet from Thwings Point to Gardiner, and 8 feet from Gardiner to Augusta. The Kennebec River is kept open by the towboats during the winter from Bath to the sea. Above Bath the buoys are taken up about November 20, and the river is likely to freeze at any time after this date. The ice usually goes out early in April. The river not only has the sea fogs, which extend to Bath, but its own river fog or mist which is dense and at times low down. On dark nights it is sometimes impossible to tell where the water ends and the shore begins. The Light-House Establishment maintains no lights or fog signals in the Kennebec, but the Kennebec Steamboat Company and the towboat companies have united for many years in maintaining lanterns hung on the buoys at turning points or other difficult places. The above facts establish, in the Board’s opinion, the necessity for and advisability of increasing the aids to navigation in the Kennebec River… .

Continuing, the report recommended that a fixed red lens-lantern light, with a white sector to the north, be erected on the southwest point of 6.9-acre Perkins Island, and that a fog bell, struck by machinery, also be established at the same location. The Perkins Island Lighthouse was the southernmost in a series of five lights recommended by the Board to mark the Kennebec River at an estimated cost not exceeding $16,725.

Aerial view of Perkins Island Light Station Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The Lighthouse Board had to repeat this petition in its 1893 and 1894 reports before Congress responded with a $17,000 appropriation on March 2, 1895. By July of 1897, title for Perkins Island was obtained, plans and specifications had been prepared, and a contract for constructing the station was agreed upon. A frame dwelling and barn were built on the island along with a wooden, octagonal tower, whose design was identical to those at Doubling Point and Squirrel Point. A lens lantern was placed in the twenty-three-foot-tall tower, where it beamed forth its light at a focal plane of forty-one feet.
A gallery with railing was constructed around the lantern in 1899, allowing the keeper to more easily keep the lantern glass clean. A boat slip was also added that same year, and in 1901 an enclosed wooden boathouse was built on the rocks just below the lighthouse.
The 1901 Annual Report noted that a fifth-order Fresnel lens had replaced the lens lantern, greatly increasing the intensity of the light, and that a bell tower, equipped with a 1,000-pound bell, had been constructed just south of the tower. The addition of an oil house was noted in the Annual Report of 1906.
In a 1938 interview, Mrs. Eugene W. Osgood, who had been living with her husband, keeper Eugene Osgood, at various Maine lighthouses for twenty-five years, declared that lighthouse keepers had a pretty comfortable life. The Osgood’s five children had grown up in lighthouses, and some of their nine grandchildren were provided a glimpse at this unique life as well. The stations they have called home include Halfway Rock, Isles of Shoals, Perkins Island, and Manana Fog Signal Station, before arriving (at the time of the interview’s publication) at the Fort Popham Lighthouse.

Perkins Island Light and dwelling Photograph courtesy Library of Congress

Mrs. Osgood recounted some of the many rescues that she and her husband had participated in over the years. During their tenure at Perkins Island, keeper Osgood heard a signal bell and cries of help during a fierce storm. Setting out in the station boat, keeper Osgood located a party of nineteen people, whose boat had grounded in the storm, and managed to get them all back to the lighthouse, where Mrs. Osgood dried them out and fed them. Nobody, including a sick boy on board, suffered greatly from this harrowing experience thanks to the courageous work of keeper Osgood.
The Perkins Island Lighthouse was automated in 1959, at which time the original fifth-order Fresnel lens was replaced by a modern optic. All structures at the station were transferred to the State of Maine in the 1960s, except for the lighthouse, which remained an active aid to navigation under the care of the Coast Guard.
While the lighthouse received regular upkeep, the fog bell tower and keeper’s dwelling gradually fell into disrepair, and at some point the boathouse was either removed or destroyed. In 2000, a portion of the roof over the front porch of the keeper’s dwelling had collapsed, and the chimney appeared ready to topple over. The fog bell tower, however, did receive a thorough restoration that year thanks to funding by the Maine Department of Conservation and a New Century Program Preservation Grant.
The American Lighthouse Foundation signed a long-term license with the Coast Guard in 2000, assuming responsibility for maintenance of the Perkins Island Lighthouse. Three years later, Friends of Perkins Island Lighthouse (FPIL), a chapter of the lighthouse foundation, was formed to help preserve the lighthouse. Although the keeper’s dwelling is controlled by the state, FPIL obtained permission to shingle the most damaged portion of the roof, rebuild the front entryway, and paint the dwelling. Much work remains to be done, but the enthusiastic FPIL members are committed to raise funds and provide much of the manpower for the long-term preservation of the historic structures on Perkins Island.

Whaleback Lighthouse, Kittery Maine

The last of the three lights you see on the Isle of Shoals boat tour from Portsmouth NH 

The first Whaleback Lighthouse, erected in 1829 and 1830 at the mouth of the Piscataqua River near the Maine-New Hampshire boundary, was so poorly built due to an unscrupulous contractor’s corner cutting that keepers often wondered during storms if the entire building would collapse into the sea. Amazingly, the structure somehow survived intact for over forty years.

First Whaleback Lighthouse that commenced operation in 1830 Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The lowest bid for the contract to build the original stone lighthouse tower and pier was $20,000 – several times what similar lighthouse in the area had cost, and in 1829 dollars more than enough to build a structure strong enough to withstand the worst of conditions. By law, Congress was forced to accept the lowest bid with no regard to the bidder’s qualifications or competence, and the building of Whaleback Ledge Lighthouse would not be the only time that this law would come back to haunt them.
When the first stones were laid for the foundation, the contractor didn’t bother to level the ground underneath, instead filling in gaps with smaller stones. As soon as the first storm hit the lighthouse, all the small stones were washed away, leaving the foundation with no underpinning. The foundation pier, constructed of rough split granite bocks, was forty-eight feet in diameter at its base and twenty-two feet high. Atop the pier, a sloping stone tower was built to a height of thirty-two feet. The first keeper, Samuel E. Hascall, quickly discovered that the building was so leaky that he was soaked every time a wave hit the lighthouse. The tower was later cased over with wood “to prevent the keeper from being drowned out by the sea washing through all the crevices.”
In 1837 and 1838, Congress appropriated a total of $20,000 to build a breakwater on the east side of the foundation for protection. However, after Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, the founder of West Point, and noted Boston architect Alexander Paris were asked for their opinion of the lighthouse and proposed breakwater, they advised tearing the whole thing down and starting over, as no breakwater could secure the present structure. Their suggestion of an allocation of $75,000 for a new lighthouse went unheeded for over two decades, and the appropriation of $20,000 went unspent.
In 1839, a local journal carried the following description of life at the lighthouse: “…such was the effect of the sea, that the assistants of the keeper could not hear each [other] speak when in the lantern, on account of the noise produced by the shaking of the apparatus in the lantern, when the sea struck the foundation of the light house…The reader may form some idea of the unenviable situation of the keeper…during the late storm from the fact that the building is situated on a ledge of sunken rocks, only visible during low water and about a mile from the nearest human habitation.”
In 1842, a civil engineer named I.W.P. Lewis was commissioned to survey a number of New England lighthouses. He described the pier at Whaleback as “rudely and fraudulently constructed,” and that large swells shook the lighthouse “in the most alarming manner. The keeper asserted that the vibration was so great as to move the chairs and tables about the floor.” He went on to point out that “the advantage of employing professional men of reputation in these public works, instead of selling the contracts to the lowest bidder, cannot better be illustrated than by contrasting the construction of the light-house on Whales’s Back rock with the Saddleback tower.”
For each year that passed and the tower somehow survived, bureaucrats in Washington became less convinced that all that money needed to be spent on a new lighthouse. They even installed a new fourth-order Fresnel lens and lantern in 1855. Iron clamps were put in place to secure the stones in the foundation pier, but they snapped off one by one. After some particularly severe storms in March of 1868, large cracks developed in the foundation. Later that year, an “iron band of six inches by two” was placed around the upper course of the stone pier, hoping it would help the structure survive the winter. An impassioned plea was also sent to Congress for funds for a new lighthouse, and Congress responded with $70,000 on July 15, 1870. The new lighthouse was to be in the style of the famous Eddystone Lighthouse, which was built to withstand conditions out in the middle of the English Channel.

1872 Whaleback Lighthouse with 1878 fog signal Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

The construction site for the new tower was covered by water except at low tide, and there were entire days when the weather prevented any work being done. The new tower was built of huge granite blocks, dovetailed together and bolted to the ledge. The base of the tower was solid to a height of twenty feet above the low-water mark, and the new tower’s beacon shone at a height of 68 feet above sea level. Finished in 1872, it was built near the old pier and tower, where the keepers continued to store their boat. The fourth-order Fresnel lens was apparently transferred over from the old tower.
But even the new tower could not resist the power of the sea; an 1886 storm broke a window in the lighthouse and almost drowned the keeper in the waves that poured in. The broken window was replaced by a solid block of granite. A metal structure was built in the lee of the tower in 1878 to house a fog signal. The old stone tower was finally removed in 1880, and “a pair of wrought-iron cranes” were attached to the west side of the fog signal building for storing the keeper’s boat. During the winter of 1888, the fog signal was in operation for about 974 hours, consuming 16,895 pounds of coal.
Currents can be complicated and tricky in these parts – for forty years author and historian Edward Rowe Snow flew his small plane over New England lighthouses at Christmas time and air-dropped presents for the keepers. One year, Snow dropped his package at Whaleback and saw that he had missed, and the presents had fallen into the sea. He went back and made another pass, this time successful. But six weeks later, someone walking on the beach at Cape Cod found the first package washed ashore – it had traveled almost 90 miles in a straight line across Massachusetts Bay!
Morgan Willis was a keeper at both Whaleback Ledge and Cape Neddick. During lonely nights at Whaleback Ledge, Willis would dial zero just to hear the voice of operator Janet St. Lawrence of Portsmouth, N.H., whom he later married in 1950.
The Whaleback Lighthouse was automated in 1963, when its Fresnel lens was replaced by revolving aerobeacons. In 2002, a VRB-25 optic was installed that could operate on solar power.
In October of 2005, Whaleback Light was licensed to the American Lighthouse Foundation. This organization is working with the town of Kittery, Maine to preserve the stone tower, which still warns mariners away from its dangerous ledges with two white flashes every ten seconds. The town of Kittery is also planning on restoring the Wood Island Life Boat Station, which is located near the Whalback Ledge Lighthouse, and turning it into a maritime/lighthouse museum and education center.
In June 2007, Whaleback Lighthouse, deemed excess by the Coast Guard, was offered at no cost to eligible entities and was awarded to the the American Lighthouse Foundation (ALF) in November 2008. Friends of Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse, a chapter of ALF, manages Whaleback Lighthouse and is raising funds for its restoration.

In October 2009, the Coast Guard installed a radio-activated foghorn and a modern VLB-44 light emitting diode (LED) beacon at Whaleback Lighthouse. When mariners require the assistance of the foghorn, they can tune their VHF radio to channel 79 and key their microphone five times. This action will activate a relay that powers the horn for forty-five minutes. Installation of the new beacon was prompted by the failure of tower's submarine electrical cable. The efficient LED beacon consumes less power than the VRB-25 it replaced, allowing a compact array of solar panels and batteries to power the light.

Portland Head Light, Point Elizabeth Maine

Another favorite light-  Seen this one multiple visits too. 

Portland Head Lighthouse, at the entrance to Portland Harbor in Maine, has a history that reads like a Who’s Who from the early years of the nation. It was the first lighthouse completed by the United States government, and is the most visited, painted, and photographed lighthouse in New England. One keeper took financial advantage of the area’s draw, another enjoyed visits with a famous poet, while yet another thought it the most desirable place he could serve. And some believe at least one former resident has never left.
In July of 1786, “the most populous and merchantile” town of Falmouth, was incorporated into the town of Portland, and by the end of the century, Portland would be described as “one of the most thriving commercial towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” (Maine would become a separate state in 1820.) Trade was burgeoning, but reluctance to fund the government remained. The Massachusetts government set aside $750 for a lighthouse at Portland Head in 1787, but the project would not be completed until after the First Congress passed the Lighthouses Act in 1789, which placed lighthouses under control of the federal government. Portland Head Lighthouse was the first lighthouse completed under the act, after Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton allocated a sum not exceeding $1,500 in August of 1790 to finish the lighthouse on Portland Head.
A fiscally minded President George Washington asked that the tower be built from local rubblestone, which could be “handled nicely when hauled by oxen on a drag.” Masons Jonathan Bryant and John Nichols set to work on the envisioned fifty-eight-foot tower, but when they were ordered to increase the height to seventy-two feet for visibility reasons, Bryant quit. Nichols finished the lighthouse and a small dwelling in late 1790.

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President Washington appointed Capt. Joseph Greenleaf—an American Revolution veteran—as the first keeper. The light, powered by sixteen whale-oil lamps, first shone on January 10, 1791, following its dedication by Marquis de Lafayette. Greenleaf received the right to live in the keeper’s house and fish and farm in the vicinity in lieu of a salary. By November though, Greenleaf was ready to quit, because he couldn’t afford to stay. Plus, the job was not easy. In June of 1792, he wrote that during the previous winter, ice on the lantern glass would freeze so thick he had to melt it off. From 1793 until his death in 1795, Greenleaf was paid $160 per annum.
David Duncan briefly assumed Greenleaf’s duties until Barzillai Delano took over in 1796. In 1809, Delano bemoaned, “the difficulty in getting from the dwelling House to light House is very great, by reason of the passage being very steep & rocky & in addition to this is often frozen over in the Winter season, by reason of the sea washing over it.” He asked the government to build a passageway connecting the tower and dwelling. However, this would not happen until 1816, when Henry Dyer was contracted to erect a new, two-room keeper’s house for $1,175. The kitchen of the new, one-story stone cottage was attached to outbuildings, which were joined to the tower.
In November of 1812, contractor Winslow Lewis wrote that the lower fifty feet of the tower “was built of the best materials, done in a workmanlike manner.” But when the original masons had parted ways, quality declined. Lewis suggested removing the poorly built upper section, which would provide a deck for a lantern ten feet in diameter. Lewis carried this out in 1813, at which time he also installed a new lamp and reflector lighting system of his own design, for $2,100.
Following the submission in 1812 of a petition carrying twenty-two signatures, Delano’s annual salary was increased from $225 to $300. The petition described Delano as “a careful keeper” who had “discharged his trust faithfully,” while noting that even $300 a year “would be but a bare subsistence for a small family.” Barzillai Delano died in 1820, but his son, James, would later follow in his father’s footsteps, serving as keeper at Portland Head from 1854 to 1861.
Directly after Delano came Captain Joshua Freeman, who would sit watching the sea with a length of rope by his side, ready in case of sudden shipwreck. Freeman was also renowned for his hospitality and supplemented his income by keeping liquor to sell for three cents a glass to visitors and fishermen.
Richard Lee earned $350 annually when he started in April 1840. In 1842, civil engineer I.W.P. Lewis reported that the tower had poor quality mortar, rotten woodwork, and a leaky roof, while the house was cracked and leaky. Lewis called for fewer, but better aligned lamps in the lantern room. Keeper Lee added that he was allowed no boat and had to pay for the use of some land, because the government provided “barely room for a garden.”
Keeper John F. Watts (1849-1853) complained no one had instructed him about the light—he had to pay a man to teach him.
In 1855, after the Lighthouse Board had been established to care for the nation’s navigational aids, a fourth-order Fresnel lens and bell tower were installed at the station. The tower was also lined with brick, and a cast-iron spiral stairway and workshop were added. Following the wreck nearby of the Bohemian, which killed forty people in 1864, a brick extension was constructed to raise the height of the tower by twenty feet, and a second-order Fresnel lens was installed in the lantern room. With these improvements in place, the Lighthouse Board proclaimed that the entrance to Portland Harbor was “so completely lighted that navigation in and out is attended with little or no danger.”
Joshua Freeman Strout became keeper in 1869 at $620 per year. His mother had worked as housekeeper for Joshua Freeman at Portland Head and named her son for him. After a fall from a mast at sea, Captain Joshua Strout returned home and became Portland Head’s keeper. Mickey, a brightly colored Macaw, came with Strout from South America and when coaxed would declare from his perch above the stove, “Light the light! Light the light! Fog’s rolling in!” As assistant keeper, Strout’s wife, Mary (Berry), was paid $480 annually. She kept the job until her son Joseph assumed the position in 1877.
In 1883, the much deteriorated twenty-foot brick addition to the tower was removed, and a new lantern and a fourth-order lens were installed. The establishment of Halfway Rock Lighthouse in 1871 reduced the importance of Portland Head Lighthouse, justifying the Lighthouse Board’s changes to the light. Less than two years later, however, the Board reversed its decision. The focal plane of the light was raised by twenty feet, and a second-order fixed white light was exhibited starting on January 15, 1885.

Portland Head Lighthouse before 1891 Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Late on Christmas Eve of 1886, the Annie C. Maguire struck the ledge at Portland Head, despite the fact that members of the crew reported that they “plainly saw Portland Light before the disaster and are unable to account for same.” Hearing the crash, Joshua and Joseph Stout snatched up a ladder to form a gangway across the rocks, while Mary tore blankets into strips, soaked them in kerosene and used them as torches. All aboard, including the captain, his wife and son, and eleven crewmembers were saved.
The Maguire’s owners were in financial trouble, and Portland’s sheriff had asked Keeper Strout to watch for the bark, so that it could be seized. When the sheriff searched the ship’s sea chest for cash and papers, the captain’s wife whispered to her husband to pretend the satchel had been lost in the wreck, when in truth she had spirited off the cash in her hatbox during the rescue. Joseph Strout later recalled: “The day before we had killed eight chickens so that we could have a great feed on Christmas. Ma made all eight the best pie you ever tasted….There was nothing on the boat to eat. All they had was a large supply of salt beef and macaroni, with lime juice to keep from getting scurvy. For months that crew had not tasted real food. Once they got that chicken pie into them, the whole gang wanted to stay.”
On the day John A. Strout, son of Joseph Strout, started his service as assistant keeper at Portland Head in January of 1912, he selected a large rock near the tower, chipped away at its face to make a relatively flat surface, and then painted a memorial to the wreck of the Annie C. Maguire. Maintaining this memorial became a tradition for subsequent keepers, and the lettering can still be seen today.
In 1891, the station’s old stone dwelling was demolished, and upon its foundation a two-story framed double dwelling, “forty-two feet six inches by forty-two feet in plan”, was constructed. A brick oil house, eight feet six inches square, was also built at the same time.
Weather could be truly harsh at Portland Head. Once during a gale the Strouts looked out their window in horror to see a giant pyramid-shaped wave fast approaching. As the wave broke on shore, it came crashing down on the fog signal building and sent water over the top of the tower. When it receded, the great wave took boulders weighing tons with it. Though terrified, the Strouts were unhurt.
Joshua Strout was Maine’s oldest keeper when he retired in 1904 at age seventy-nine. He recalled that during his career he had gone as long as seventeen years without time off and as long as two years without traveling as far as Portland. His son Joseph Strout served as keeper until 1928, bringing the family’s tenure at the station to just one year short of six decades.
Portland Head Light was extinguished from June 1942 through June 1945 to avoid guiding German submarines. For much of the war, unauthorized visitors were forbidden at the light. Thayer Sterling, who penned Lighthouses of the Maine Coast and the Men Who Keep Them, was the last keeper before the Coast Guard took over in 1946.
While Sterling proclaimed Portland Head the best possible light station for a keeper, the families of keepers sometimes found themselves in unusual situations. Sterling’s wife, Martha, enjoyed knitting in a chair next to the window. But one evening, Sterling’s dog, Chang, was growling so fiercely that she left to knit elsewhere. No sooner had she moved then a giant wave crashed into the house, breaking the window and spraying shards of glass over her chair.
Once during the 1950s, a woman walked into the keeper’s house and sat down at the kitchen table, insisting that as government employees the Coast Guard keeper and his wife were obliged to serve her. By the early 1960s, Coast Guard families had learned to keep downstairs doors and windows locked. One time, after the coastguardsman’s wife had forgotten to lock the front door, camera-carrying tourists flung open the bathroom door while she was in the tub.
During the years following automation when an apartment in the keeper’s house was rented out, some occupants felt they were not alone there. Ed Ellis and his wife, Elaine Amass, told tales of their motion-detector alarm on the stairs going off at night when nobody was there. Geraldine Reed, who lived in the keeper’s dwelling in the 1960s with her husband, coastguardsman Tom Reed, thought there was a ghostly presence in the basement. “My feeling is that he was a friendly ghost and just needed to be told that his keeper days were over and he could rest in peace,” she wrote.
A celebration was held at Portland Head Lighthouse on August 7, 1989 to commemorate the bicentennial of the lighthouse service and to mark the automation of the light. The second-order Fresnel lens was removed from the lantern room in 1958 and replaced by an aerobeacon.
The Town of Cape Elizabeth was given a lease to the property in 1990, and two years later the Museum at Portland Head Light opened in the keeper’s dwelling. An old garage was later converted into a gift shop to support the museum. The town received the deed to the lighthouse in 1993, but the Coast Guard retains control of the light and fog signal.
A frequent visitor at the light, sipping cool drinks with the keeper, was poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote a poem entitled “The Lighthouse,” doubtlessly inspired by Portland Head. One of the poem’s stanzas seems a fitting honor to this historic light.

 Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same,
Year after year, through all the silent night
Burns on forevermore that quenchless flame,
Shines on that inextinguishable light!