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ILLUMINATE YOUR LIFE WITH LIGHTHOUSES

Maine’s long, wrinkled coastline is necessarily dotted with lighthouses. More than five dozen lighthouses—the second highest number in the country—still flash in the dark and fog to guide sailors safely past Maine’s fabled cliffs and rocks as they have for two hundred years.

While the Coast Guard still maintains aids to navigation in Maine, ownership and sometimes operation of the lighthouses now rest in the hands of local agencies or preservation groups. The Maine Lights program, passed by Congress in 1996, led to the transfer of 28 lighthouses from the Coast Guard to local preservation groups or other agencies and served as a model for the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000. Except for eight privately owned towers, all but a handful of Maine’s lighthouses now have local support groups, such as Friends of Rockland Harbor Lights.

Maine is also home to a national organization dedicated to lighthouse preservation, the American Lighthouse Foundation, based in Rockland, and to Lighthouse Digest magazine, “Saving lighthouse history since 1992.”