A busy day of sailing near the Isle of Shoals Lighthouse is depicted in this engraving, titled Off Portsmouth Harbor, N.H., after a painting by Julian Oliver Davidson, 1878.
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A busy day of sailing near the Isle of Shoals Lighthouse is depicted in this engraving, titled Off Portsmouth Harbor, N.H., after a painting by Julian Oliver Davidson, 1878.
THE CIVIL WAR LEFT IN ITS WAKE RUIN AND DESTRUCTION NOT seen since in America, and like so much of the country’s infrastructure, lighthouses bore much of this toll. Yet the war was also a time of triumph for the Lighthouse Board. Not only did it work diligently and effectively at relighting the South as soon as conditions became safe enough to do so, but it also redoubled its efforts to maintain and operate lighthouses throughout the rest of the country, and even built a few new ones. The board’s commitment to improving the nation’s lighthouse system remained steadfast in the decades following the war. Befitting the times, board chairman Joseph Henry wrote in 1873, “The character of the aids which any nation furnishes the mariner in approaching and leaving its shores marks, in a conspicuous degree, its advancement in civilization.” With this philosophy firmly ensconced, the board endeavored to provide mariners with the best lighthouses possible.
One of the most dramatic changes during this frenetic period of growth involved the source of illumination. The origins of this shift reach back to the early 1850s, when the board realized it faced what appeared to be an insuperable problem. The price of the sperm oil that kept the lighthouses shining was rapidly increasing, due to the law of supply and demand. As American whalemen spent more money and time than ever before, traveling further across the globe to chase an ever-dwindling number of whales, the cost of obtaining sperm oil soared, and the amount of oil brought back to America’s shores plunged. At the same time demand grew, inevitably leading to rising prices. Most of the sperm oil went to lighting American homes, businesses, and city streets, and also to lubricating the gears of industry. While only a small part of the demand actually resulted from lighthouse needs, the average price the board paid for a gallon of sperm oil rose exorbitantly from 55 cents in 1840–41, to $2.25 in 1855.* And there was every indication that the price was only going to go higher as the cycle of diminishing supply and rising demand continued.
Even though the Fresnel lenses used less sperm oil than the reflectors they replaced, the amount of oil flowing through the arteries of America’s lighthouse system was considerable. As a result, the board faced a decision. It could continue to spend an increasing percentage of its budget on sperm oil, straining its resources and sacrificing other parts of the lighthouse system, or it could find another, cheaper illuminant. It wisely chose the latter.
The board first focused on colza oil, also called rapeseed oil, which came from a species of wild cabbage that grew widely in Europe.† The French had used colza oil as a lighthouse illuminant since the early 1800s, and the British adopted it in later years. It produced a light that was equivalent to that of sperm, but at a much lower cost. The main obstacle to using it in America was the lack of a domestic source. The board tried to remedy this in the late 1850s and early 1860s by distributing colza seeds to farmers and encouraging them to raise the crop. A few farmers pursued this new venture, but they did not produce nearly enough oil to come even close to supplanting sperm oil.
At the same time that the board was promoting colza, it was also exploring the possibility of using lard oil and kerosene. Lard oil came from rendered hogs, while kerosene, also called mineral oil, had been derived primarily from coal and was available in only limited quantities throughout most of the 1850s. However, this all changed in 1859, when “Colonel” Edwin L. Drake drilled a well seventy feet deep into the ground in the isolated hamlet of Titusville, Pennsylvania, releasing a gusher of oil. This so-called black gold suddenly provided a new and much more plentiful raw material for the production of kerosene, and as the number of oil wells exploded, cheap kerosene flooded the market.
By the early 1860s, kerosene and, to a much lesser extent, lard oil were illuminating an ever-increasing number of homes and businesses, displacing sperm oil in the process. The board, however, was reluctant to switch to kerosene, claiming that its quality at this early date of introduction was “too volatile and combustible to be safely employed for lighthouse purposes.” Lard oil, in contrast, proved much more promising, since it was not only a relatively safe fuel, being less combustible than kerosene, but it also burned brighter than sperm oil and was much cheaper. Indeed, a small number of lighthouses had been experimenting with lard oil as far back as the early 1840s, with encouraging results. The primary impediment to using it was that it congealed and didn’t burn well at low temperatures, but Joseph Henry’s experiments proved that there was an easy solution—simply burn it at a higher temperature by using larger lamps that generated more heat. Still, in very cold climates keepers often had to warm the lard oil on stoves to liquefy it before adding it to the lamp. With these fixes addressed, the board quickly adopted lard oil, and by 1867 virtually all the lighthouses in the system were using it.
The iron law of supply and demand, however, asserted itself again: With lighthouses consuming so much lard oil, its price skyrocketed, leading the board to take another look at kerosene. The board was still wary of this fuel, especially in light of an accident that had taken place in 1864, when a keeper on Lake Michigan decided to replace the lighthouse’s lard oil lamp with one that used kerosene. For a few nights this substitution appeared to be a great success, with the new lamp providing a penetrating light, but one morning, while the keeper attempted to douse the lamp by blowing down its chimney, the lamp suddenly exploded, spewing flaming oil about the lantern room and onto the keeper’s clothes. He barely made it down the stairs and out of the tower, only moments before another much bigger explosion blew apart the lantern room and destroyed the lens.
By the 1870s, however, kerosene was getting progressively cheaper, and the distillation process had improved to the point that the quality of the kerosene was much higher and less volatile than had been the case in earlier years. Although the board still considered lard oil the better illuminant, it slowly shifted to kerosene for economic reasons, since it was roughly half the cost. At first only the smaller-order lenses made the switch, but over time, and with the use of improved lamp designs, the use of kerosene expanded to larger lenses, to the point that by 1885 the transition from lard oil to kerosene was complete.
Yet the forward momentum of technology continued to increase, and about the same time that kerosene supplanted lard oil, the board began experimenting with electricity. The main type of commercial electric light widely available at the time came from carbon arc lamps, a technology invented by the Englishman Sir Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, in which an electrical current arcing between the tips of two carbon rods caused the resulting superheated carbon vapor to glow incandescently, creating an extremely bright light. Because of their intense brilliance, arc lamps were too powerful for domestic use indoors, but they quickly were adopted for use in streetlamps and in industrial settings. The board’s first opportunity to evaluate this technology came with the arrival of the Statue of Liberty, which was erected on Bedloe’s (now Liberty) Island in New York Harbor in the mid-1880s.
The Great Bartholdi Statue, Liberty Enlightening the World, holding aloft a kerosene lamp. Currier & Ives print, circa 1885.
When the Frenchman Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty—or Liberty Enlightening the World, as it was originally known—in the 1870s, he intended this gift to America to serve not only as a historical metaphor of sorts, a towering exemplar of the friendship between the two countries who had fought side by side to achieve America’s independence, but also as an actual beacon or functioning lighthouse welcoming the world to America’s shores. To that end the interior of the torch that Lady Liberty held aloft was fitted with nine carbon arc lamps that were to shine through two rings of circular openings cut from the lower portion of the sculpted flame, which were fitted with glass. The lamps would then be powered by an on-site generator. When the statue was illuminated for the first time on November 1, 1886, however, it produced only a weak light, due to the small size of the openings and their configuration. The public and the press alike ridiculed this feeble performance. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World branded it “more like a glow worm than a beacon.”
Although an engineer detailed from the board designed the torch’s illumination, the board itself had no formal responsibility for the statue itself until two weeks later, November 16, when President Grover Cleveland signed an executive order officially giving it the job of operating the statue as a lighthouse. While the board was able to improve the quality of the light somewhat over time, it never considered the statue to be an effective lighthouse. The secretary of war, Elihu Root, agreed with that assessment, writing to President Theodore Roosevelt in December 1901, “The light in the statue is useless so far as navigation is concerned.” Root asked Roosevelt to transfer responsibility for the statue to his department, a move that was heartily supported by the board, and by the end of the year Roosevelt approved the move, ending Lady Liberty’s transitory days as a lighthouse.
The board had more success with electricity at the Navesink Lighthouse in New Jersey, which had been built in 1862 to replace the one that had stood on that spot since 1828. Both lighthouses had a north and a south tower, and the towers of the earlier lighthouse were used in 1841 to test the first Fresnel lenses brought to America. Nearly sixty years later, in 1898, the south tower of the new lighthouse became the site of an equally novel test, when the board fitted it out with a carbon arc lamp, making Navesink the first primary lighthouse in the country lit by electricity.
The lamp was enclosed in a relatively new type of Fresnel lens called a bivalve, or clamshell, lens, which had two halves, each with a bull’s-eye surrounded by prisms. The lens weighed more than seven tons and made a complete revolution in ten seconds, sending a flash of light out toward the horizon every five seconds. And a great flash it was, estimated to have a candlepower of 25,000,000. Navesink was by far the most powerful lighthouse in the country. The light could be seen twenty-two miles away before disappearing over the horizon, with some observers reporting that the loom of the light, or its reflection off the sky, was visible as far as seventy miles away. While turn-of-the-century mariners welcomed the almost sun-like beam, area residents were understandably none too happy having their houses lit up nightly like the Fourth of July. Numerous complaints induced the board to blacken the lantern room’s landward-facing panels, to the great relief of the locals.
The twin lights of the Navesink Lighthouse, built in 1862, with the south tower in the foreground.
These tentative steps in using electricity foreshadowed a point when electricity would become the only illumination source in America’s lighthouses, but, in the meantime, there was another major advance in the burning of kerosene—the incandescent oil vapor lamp (IOV). In this lamp the kerosene was first heated and vaporized, then the gas was mixed with air and ignited by a Bunsen burner under a mantle, producing a brilliant white light. IOV lamps were eight times brighter than traditional kerosene lamps, and better yet, they used much less fuel to generate the same amount of light. If the IOV lamp sounds familiar, that is because it is similar in design to modern camping lamps that use propane as fuel. The first IOV lamp was installed at the North Hook Beacon at Sandy Hook in 1904, and from there this new technology quickly spread to many other lighthouses.
Other changes to the illuminating apparatus involved the manner of rotating the lens. The clockwork mechanism, whether powered by falling weights or a motor, could turn the larger lenses only so fast on account of the great weight of the lens and the goodly amount of friction created as it rolled over the chariot wheels. To speed the rate of rotation, two new mechanisms were employed starting in the late 1800s. Some lighthouses replaced the chariot wheels with ball bearings, while others began using mercury flotation systems. According to the lighthouse historian Thomas Tag, “The mercury bath consisted of a doughnut-shaped basin in which a relatively small amount of mercury was placed. Attached to the base of the lens was a large doughnut-shaped ring that was submerged in, and supported by, the mercury, which was placed in the basin. This assembly provided a nearly frictionless base for the lens to ride upon, allowing lenses weighing several tons to be started in motion with the push of a single finger.” A large first-order lens on chariot wheels could take up to eight minutes to make a single revolution, so unless the lens had numerous panels, the flash pattern would be relatively slow, which might limit the mariner’s ability to fix his position. With the mercury system, the lens could have far fewer panels, and provide not only a very rapid but a far brighter flash, since humans perceive rapid flashes of light as being more intense than ones of longer duration.
Navesink’s bivalve, or clamshell, Fresnel lens, on display at Boston’s Museum of Science, circa 1951.
Assistant keeper Gus Axelson, preheating the incandescent oil vapor (IOV) lamp at the Fire Island Lighthouse, December 1934.
Augustin Fresnel had many decades before come up with the idea of using mercury flotation systems, but it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the French and then the British began manufacturing them. The Americans purchased foreign systems and even built a few of their own, all of which were installed between 1893 and 1920 at roughly forty American lighthouses. At the time there was no concern about the negative health impacts of mercury vapors because such linkages had yet to be discovered. Given what we know now, however, one might wonder if any American lighthouse keepers were adversely affected by mercury exposure. Although there are no documented cases of cause and effect, some have speculated that a few keepers who went insane and were removed from their positions might have gotten that way as a result of inhaling too many fumes.‡
THE EVOLUTION OF LIGHTHOUSE illumination coincided with progress in lighthouse design and construction. Some of the trends that were initiated by the board in the 1850s continued after the war and throughout the end of the nineteenth century. The extremely tall towers the board built in that earlier period were joined by others in the 1870s and 1880s. All these giants were in the South, including Florida’s statuesque 175-foot Ponce de Leon Lighthouse (1887), the third tallest in the United States. And when the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, already raised to 150 feet in 1854, was found to be suffering from cracks and other structural problems, it was replaced in 1870 with a brand-new masonry tower, composed of more than one million bricks, that soared to 193 feet, giving it pride of place as the nation’s tallest lighthouse.
Similarly, in the 1850s the board began painting lighthouses with individual markings that made them more visible and distinguishable during the day, and these daymarks were widely replicated in the years after the war. Designs included the now-iconic black-and-white candystripe, or spiral-banding, pattern on the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on North Carolina’s Cape Lookout Lighthouse. Some lighthouses were painted attractively red as well, with the Sapelo Island Lighthouse in Georgia sporting alternating horizontal red and white stripes.
The board also expanded the use of cast-iron plates—a common building component in those years—in lighthouse construction. Cast iron was durable, noncombustible, water-resistant, and cheaper than masonry, and pieces of the lighthouse could be prefabricated into virtually any shape desired and transported to the site for easier assembly. Although typically lined with brick for additional stability and insulation, cast-iron towers were nevertheless lighter than masonry lighthouses of the same size, which made them a good choice for areas that did not provide a strong foundation for a very heavy structure. When the old Cape Henry Lighthouse began to exhibit cracks in its masonry, the board replaced it in 1881 with a 163-foot, cast-iron-plate tower, which is the tallest such tower in the United States. Interestingly enough, despite the board’s fear that the old lighthouse was in imminent peril of toppling over, it still stands today, about 350 feet from its replacement.
Iron, and later steel, was also used to build skeleton-tower lighthouses on land. Skeleton towers were prefabricated and constructed on site. They could be easily raised in height by adding sections, and a few of them were even disassembled and moved from one location to another. Relatively lightweight, skeleton towers were especially useful in unstable sandy or muddy areas. The tallest skeleton tower lighthouse in the United States is the one at Cape Charles, Virginia, completed in 1895, and 191 feet high, making it the second tallest lighthouse in the nation.
West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Lubec, Maine, is painted with red and white stripes. It is located at the easternmost point of the United States mainland.
Cape Charles Lighthouse in Cape Charles, Virginia, circa 1895.
The board continued building cottage-style screw-pile lighthouses at relatively shallow, somewhat protected sites, mainly along the northeastern and mid-Atlantic coasts. At more exposed sites, however, the board increasingly opted for caisson lighthouses. While screw-pile lighthouses were basically a small house on stilts—and as such fairly delicate and subject to being damaged or swept away by violent storms, strong currents, and ice floes—caisson lighthouses were far sturdier and better able to withstand the elements. With the most common type of caisson lighthouse, iron plates were bolted together on land to create a hollow cylinder enclosed on the bottom. The caisson was then towed to the desired location, and sunk into the water by pouring in stone and concrete. As the structure sank deeper, additional iron sections were bolted to the top, and more stone and concrete were poured in until the caisson was sitting on the bottom, forming a very strong, solid foundation. The keeper’s quarters and the lantern room—usually made of iron, and often cylindrical in shape—were then built on top of the caisson, above the water level. This type of caisson worked well on flat, relatively stable sand or mud bottoms. In more challenging locations, however, where the bottom was unusually soft, or it had to be leveled or obstructions removed, pneumatic caissons were employed.
The caisson for the Ship John Shoal Lighthouse being towed to the construction site. The lighthouse is off Downe Township, New Jersey, in Delaware Bay.
Pneumatic caissons began on land as well, with a prefabricated iron cylinder, but the cylinder was enclosed higher up, rather than at the bottom, creating a work chamber below, into which a hollow iron access shaft was inserted. This entire structure was then towed to the site and sunk to the bottom. At this point compressed air—hence the term “pneumatic”—was continuously pumped into the work chamber, forcing all the water out through the bottom of the caisson. Men then entered the work chamber through the access shaft and began digging, with the sand, mud, and gravel they dislodged being pumped out and over the side of the caisson into the water. As the men dug, the caisson slowly sank deeper into the bottom, and more iron sections were bolted to the top to keep the caisson’s lip above water. Once the caisson reached the desired depth, the men exited, and the shaft, chamber, and upper portions of the caisson were filled with concrete. Then the lighthouse was placed on top.
Erecting pneumatic caissons was punishing work. Not only was the digging hard, but the men also had to deal with the intense air pressure and, often, extreme heat and humidity. When the caisson had to be sunk particularly deep, the process of equalizing the pressure in the chamber frequently gave the men severe headaches and caused blood to drip from their noses and ears. In extreme cases, men who stayed down too long and then left the pressurized chamber too quickly could get caisson disease, a painful condition very similar to decompression sickness, or the bends, exhibited by divers who ascend too quickly.
On account of their distinctive shape, caisson lighthouses were often called spark-plug or coffeepot lights. Many caisson lighthouses replaced screw-pile lighthouses that had been damaged or destroyed by ice, Maryland’s Sharps Island Lighthouse being a case in point.
Sharps Island—which has since eroded away—was located on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay near the southern tip of Tilghman Island. The first lighthouse in this location, a simple wooden house with a lantern room on top, was built in 1838. It conveniently had wheels so it could be moved in case the wind and tides ate away the lighthouse’s foundation—which is exactly what happened, and the lighthouse was wheeled farther inland in 1848. This relentless erosion continued its assault, and by 1864 the lighthouse was again teetering on the edge. Fearing that the lighthouse would not survive much longer, in 1866 the board replaced it with a screw-pile structure located near the island in seven and a half feet of water. It, too, however, was destined to have a relatively short life.
Craighill Channel Lower Range Front Light, circa 1873. This caisson-style lighthouse is located in Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Maryland.
Late on Wednesday, February 9, 1881, Columbus Butler, the head keeper at Sharps Island, and the assistant keeper, Charles L. Tarr, were growing increasingly nervous. Over the years a number of screw-pile lighthouses in the Chesapeake had been destroyed by ice, and now the ice floes were running thick and picking up speed, pushed along by the steady winds from a southeast gale. As the ice groaned and scraped against the lighthouse’s iron legs, Butler became convinced that the entire structure would soon topple. His prediction came true in the morning, when a massive ice floe careened into the lighthouse with such a ferocious punch that in less than five minutes it knocked the wooden keeper’s house off its legs and into the ice-choked waters.
As the surging ice floes surrounded the lighthouse, jamming shut the doors and windows, the keepers hastily clambered into the lantern room. For sixteen and a half hours, without any food or warmth to sustain them, Butler and Tarr hung on desperately as the lighthouse took them on a terrifying ride through the bay. Pitching from side to side and bouncing violently off the ice, the lighthouse often seemed on the edge of shattering to pieces or going under, as it quickly filled with water. Butler feared that they wouldn’t survive, but after drifting about five miles, the lighthouse ended up not far from where it started its harrowing journey, grounding at high tide on the edge of Tilghman Island at about one in the morning on February 11. Once they were confident that the lighthouse would not float away, the two men—famished, numb, and exhausted—slogged their arduous way to the shore, finding refuge at a nearby house. Remarkably, true to their duty as keepers and fortified by food and warmth following their icy ordeal, they then returned at low tide to retrieve the Fresnel lens, the pedestal, and other items, before reporting the loss to their superiors. For staying with their lighthouse and saving its valuable apparatus, Butler and Tarr received commendations from the board.
Concluding that another screw-pile lighthouse in the same location would likely meet a similar icy fate, the board wisely opted in 1882 to build a caisson lighthouse instead, which became the third and final Sharps Island Lighthouse. As strong as this caisson structure was, ice battered it during a few particularly severe winters in the mid-1970s, which left the lighthouse tilted at a fifteen- to twenty-degree angle.
The Sharps Island Lighthouse, with the tilt. The lighthouse is no longer an active aid to navigation.
It wasn’t only ice that threatened screwpile lighthouses. On the morning of December 27, 1909, the four-masted schooner Malcom Baxter, Jr., was being towed to Norfolk by a tugboat in rough seas, high winds, and snowy conditions, when it veered off course, heading straight for the Thimble Shoal Lighthouse, located near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Keeper Charles S. Hudgins and his two assistants were inside at the time wrapped in blankets and sitting around the stove trying to keep warm, when the schooner’s jib boom crashed into the lighthouse, nearly cleaving it in two, flinging the men off their chairs, and toppling the stove. The burning coals skittering along the wood floor set the building ablaze, forcing the men to flee in the lighthouse boat. Before the flames could engulf the Malcolm Baxter, the current pushed it clear of the lighthouse, which was now a fireball visible for miles around. Almost everything, including the lens and the fog bell machinery, was destroyed, and all that remained was the lighthouse’s twisted iron legs. In 1914 the board built a much sturdier caisson-style lighthouse on Thimble Shoal right next to the forlorn skeletal frame of the screwpile it replaced.
In the early 1900s, as new technologies began to transform American engineering and building, the board began using a relatively novel construction material—concrete reinforced with steel or iron to add tensile strength to the towers. The first experiment with this came on the heels of the San Francisco Earthquake on April 18, 1906, still the most famous temblor in the country’s history. A little after five in the morning, the tectonic plates lying on either side of the San Andreas Fault ground past each other, moving as much as twenty feet or more in just over a minute, setting off a cataclysm of monstrous proportions. Estimated to have registered close to 8.0 on the Richter scale (which would not be invented until the 1930s), the earthquake destroyed nearly thirty thousand buildings, killed about three thousand people, and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
Area lighthouses didn’t escape the earthquake’s wrath, and the Point Arena Lighthouse, located on a bold promontory about 130 miles northwest of San Francisco, and just to the west of the fault, suffered the worst. According to the keeper on watch, “A heavy blow first struck the tower from the south. … The tower quivered for a few seconds, went far over to the north, came back, and then swung north again, repeating this several times. Immediately after came rapid and violent vibrations, rending the tower apart, … while the lenses, reflectors, etc., in the lantern were shaken from their settings and fell in a shower upon the iron floor.” The violence of the quake damaged the tower and keeper’s quarters so severely that both had to be torn down. The replacement lighthouse, 115 feet tall and made of reinforced concrete, was first lit in 1908, and in later years many other lighthouses, especially in areas subject to earthquakes, used the same material.
Point Arena Lighthouse, Point Arena, California.
GIVEN THE FEVERISH PACE of inventions during this time, the board made great gains in the area of fog-signal technology as well. By the early 1900s the days of blasting cannons, shooting guns, or manually struck bells were over, and instead keepers were employing a great variety of technologically advanced whistles, sirens, and trumpets powered by steam, hot air, or electricity. Bells with automatic strikers, regulated by falling weights, provided another means of sounding an alarm, warning mariners slowly making their way through pea-soup fog that land—and potential danger—was close at hand.
Since such signals are only needed where fog heavily envelops a region, many lighthouses didn’t have them. Hardly any lighthouses south of the Chesapeake Bay had fog signals, and there were none in the Gulf of Mexico. However, in New England, along the Pacific coast, and on the Great Lakes, where fog is often present hundreds or even thousands of hours per year, fog signals were an absolute necessity. Maine’s Seguin Island Lighthouse, just offshore from the mouth of the Kennebec River, in the southern part of the state, set the record for fog in 1907, when it was blanketed for 2,734 hours, or roughly one-third of the year.
Although undeniably helpful to mariners, fog signals were often a great annoyance to people who lived near them and had to withstand hours or perhaps days of listening to the varied and plaintive cries of these powerful noisemakers. A reporter from the New York Herald in 1905, in an article titled, “Siren is Breaking Up Happy Homes,” employed rich literary metaphors to describe the sound of the new fog signal installed at the Great Captain Island Lighthouse, off the coast of Greenwich, Connecticut. It began, he wrote, with “a screech like an army of panthers, weird and prolonged, gradually lowering in note until after a half a minute it becomes the roar of a thousand mad bulls, with intermediate voices suggestive of a wail of a lost soul, the moan of a bottomless pit and the groan of a disabled elevator.” Complaints led the board to build a house for the fog signal, and make other modifications to reduce the din.
Fog-signal machinery, circa 1873.
It wasn’t only the lighthouse’s neighbors who could be rattled by the noise. Keepers as well had to withstand the acoustic barrage, and at much closer quarters. Although most of them adjusted to the sound, and could even sleep through it, there were times when the auditory onslaught pushed them to the edge of incoherence. At one point in 1887, the keepers at the Point Reyes Lighthouse, which is located about thirty miles northwest of San Francisco on a towering jagged headland jutting far out to sea, kept the fog signal running for 176 hours straight, with each blast of the siren lasting five seconds and recurring every seventy seconds. As if proving that it wasn’t just mercury fumes that posed a risk to the sanity of a lighthouse keeper, a reporter on hand noted that the “jaded attendants looked as if they had been on a protracted spree.”
IN FACT THE BOARD focused its attention not only on the lighthouses but also on the keepers who ran them. In 1876 it began distributing books to keepers at the more isolated lighthouses, the very people in most desperate in need of entertainment, who didn’t have the option of walking to a nearby town to get reading material. This was not a purely altruistic act, for by providing them with books, the board believed that the keepers would “be made happier and more contented with their lot, and less desirous of absenting themselves from their post.”
Thus seeking to prevent or ameliorate the psychological isolation keepers were prone to, the board started with fifty minilibraries, each containing about forty books, housed in an attractive, sturdy, and portable wooden box. These stayed at each lighthouse six months before being swapped for another. Donated by private individuals or purchased by the board, the books included the obligatory Bible and hymnbooks, along with a great variety of fiction and nonfiction—everything from novels to poetry and books on science. Upon opening the latest personal “athenaeum,” a keeper might find Robinson Crusoe and The Last Days of Pompeii alongside a new installment of the series The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. These libraries proved so popular that within a few decades the number in circulation grew to more than five hundred.
One of the many minilibraries that traveled from lighthouse to lighthouse, providing keepers with entertainment and education.
In 1883 the board began requiring male keepers to wear dress uniforms (female keepers—more about them later—were exempt from this rule). The uniform was a spiffy indigo-blue, wool outfit, including a double-breasted jacket with ten buttons, trousers, and a vest. There was also a visored blue cap, to which a brass lighthouse badge was pinned. The keepers were supposed to wear the uniform while on duty but had to take off the jacket and wear an apron while cleaning the delicate lighting apparatus. Also, when working outside, they could exchange their dress uniform for a brown working suit. Relying implicitly on the theory that clothes make the man, the board believed that the uniforms would “aid in maintaining [the lighthouse system’s] … discipline, increase its efficiency, raise its tone, and add to its esprit de corps.”
Another keeper-related issue the board tackled was patronage. Political favoritism and graft were rampant at the time throughout all levels of government. Ever since the earliest years of the lighthouse establishment, there had been keepers who were appointed as a result of whom they knew and which party they backed, rather than their suitability for the position. This had become a much more common practice beginning in the early 1800s, when customs collectors got more directly involved in nominating keepers. After all, customs collectors, themselves political appointees, often viewed keepers’ jobs as plums to be handed out to party supporters. Furthermore, the secretary of the Treasury, who approved or rejected keeper nominations, was just as likely to let politics, not merit, determine hiring decisions.
While some keepers appointed as the result of patronage performed admirably, many were literally and figuratively out of their depth, as was the case for an “efficient party man” and a “shining light … on election days,” who had been appointed keeper at a Maine lighthouse in 1849. According to the Portland Advertiser, this man hailed from the center of the state and was wholly ignorant of maritime matters. Soon after the keeper took over, mariners began complaining that the light at his lighthouse didn’t burn after midnight. When informed of these complaints by an official from the lighthouse establishment, the exasperated keeper replied, “Well, I know they don’t, for I put’ em out myself then, for I thought all the vessels had got by by that time, and I wanted to save the oil.” Whether the keeper was forced to change his “lights out by midnight” policy or was sacked is not known.
This story notwithstanding, patronage was no laughing matter. It had more serious and corrosive effects, often putting lives in the hands of the incompetent and sapping the system of its most talented employees. As board chairman Henry lamented in 1873, “In regard to light-keepers, the most efficient and faithful men, who from years of practice have acquired the skill necessary to a proper discharge of their duties, have been in many cases changed by collectors of customs for new men, for no other reason than to give place to some political favorite.” Consider the fate of the keeper at Massachusetts’s Wing Neck Lighthouse, who was callously dismissed in 1854. According to a local paper, “Mr. Lawrence was a faithful, capable man and was appointed at the time the lighthouse was built. His crime consisted in having been appointed by the Whigs.” During President Lincoln’s first term of office, 75 percent of keepers were replaced with friends of the administration, notwithstanding the fact that Lincoln himself often complained bitterly about the seemingly endless lines of office-seekers demanding their due. This patronage onslaught led one Republican newspaper to propose in 1861 a “new plan for lighting the coast”—simply to let every man who has applied to be a lighthouse keeper stand on the shore with a “torch in his hand. There will be no need of government oil.” It is no wonder, then, that the journalist, short-story writer, and scathing social critic Ambrose Bierce, whose bitter, sardonic taunts entertained the nation for several generations, defined a lighthouse in his infamous Devil’s Dictionary as “A tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and the friend of a politician.” The regularity of the dismissal of keepers in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, often for political reasons, is evidenced by the cursory form letter used to tell them that it was time for them to go, which simply stated, “You are superseded as keeper of _____ light station on _____, 18_____, by _____.” And usually it was the keeper’s replacement, ready to move in, who delivered this most unwelcome news.
The board did its best to dull the impact of patronage by, among other things, requiring prospective keepers to meet certain standards, placing keepers on probation for three months, and at the end of that period testing their skills and firing those who didn’t pass. The board also set the process at a further remove from the machinations of politics by stripping customs collectors of their power to nominate keepers, transferring that task instead to lighthouse inspectors. Such measures did have a positive impact, and toward the end of the nineteenth century it became increasingly common for keepers to serve an apprenticeship and rise through the ranks, moving from assistant to head keeper over time, rather than being appointed from the outside for political reasons.
Impressive array of Fresnel lenses displayed at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, held in Omaha, Nebraska.
But the single greatest tool in the fight against patronage arrived in 1896, when President Grover Cleveland, a tireless foe of influence peddling and political corruption, issued an executive order that included lighthouse keepers in the classified civil service. Applicants now had to be qualified and pass written and oral examinations to get the job, and political affiliation was not allowed to influence appointments or dismissals. Furthermore, the job became permanent only after the successful completion of a six-month probationary period. As a result of both the board’s efforts and the executive order, patronage appointments were largely eliminated. America’s lighthouse keepers were now part of a true career civil service in which merit, not connections, drove hiring and promotion decisions. This progressive change provided them, and the mariners who depended on their dedication and skills, a greater measure of security.
THE GEOGRAPHIC REACH OF the lighthouse system expanded dramatically under the board’s watch. When U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2 million—roughly two cents per acre—nearly seven thousand miles were added to America’s coastline overnight. At the time there was just one navigational light in the territory that could, charitably at best, be called a lighthouse. It was located in Sitka in the cupola of the governor’s mansion, usually referred to as Baranov’s Castle in honor of Aleksandr Baranov, the first governor of the Russian colony in Alaska and manager of the Russian-American Company, which had operated a lucrative fur-trading business in the area since 1799. (The company’s fortunes were built on the backs of Native Alaskans, or Aleuts, who were treated brutally by the Russians and forced to kill hundreds of thousands of sea otters for their pelts.) The light in the cupola was very primitive, consisting of four copper cans filled with seal oil, each with a wick, and backed by a single large reflector. Though relatively feeble, this light had long been a welcome sight for Russian mariners heading to Alaska. Upon sighting the lighthouse at Sitka in 1839, the Russian naval officer Lavrentiy Zagoskin wrote, “There are no words to express the feelings that induce a sailor to offer fervent prayers when he sees this mark of sympathy expressed by his fellow men. Suddenly he sees that he is no longer alone in the midst of the ocean waves; he sees that people are caring for him with paternal solicitude.” An American army sergeant at the garrison in Sitka operated the lighthouse until 1877, but when the army left that year, the light was extinguished.
A couple of years after the purchase of Alaska, the Coast Survey submitted a report recommending where lighthouses might best be located in the territory. While this resulted in the establishment of many unlighted buoys, a new lighthouse would not be built in Alaska until the early 1900s. The specific reason for this delay is not clear, although one possible explanation is that there were more pressing demands for lighthouses in the rest of the United States, where maritime commercial needs were greater. As some have claimed, it could also have been that lighting such a long and remote coastline was simply too expensive or difficult to contemplate at the time. Or perhaps it was because too few politicians viewed Alaska, derisively referred to for decades as “Seward’s Folly” and “Walrussia,” as a valuable addition to the country, worthy of development.
By the late 1800s, however, the pressure to build lighthouses in Alaska reached a tipping point. The rapid expansion of the lumbering and fishing industries brought many ships north, but what really triggered a maritime stampede was the discovery of gold in northwestern Canada’s Klondike region in 1896. An estimated one hundred thousand prospectors headed to Alaska during the Klondike gold rush, most of them landing in Skagway before attempting to hike over the Coast Mountains to the goldfields; a grueling trek that forced the vast majority to turn back before reaching their destination. Among the ranks of this deluge of fortune seekers was the twenty-one-year-old Jack London, who later drew from his year-long Alaskan adventure to pen the literary classics, The Call of the Wild and White Fang.
With so many ships traveling the treacherous waters off Alaska—especially those of the territory’s sinuous Inside Passage, which were strewn with rocky reefs and small icebergs—there were numerous wrecks. One of the worst was that of the steamer Clara Nevada, which was heading from Skagway to Juneau in February 1898. Battling hurricane-force winds as high as ninety miles per hour, the Clara Nevada sank off Eldred Rock about thirty miles south of Skagway, killing all on board. Exactly how many perished is a mystery since the only passenger list went down with the ship, but estimates of the death toll range from 60 to more than 130 lost. The cause of the wreck is also a mystery. While it appears that there was a fire on board, whether it started before or after the ship foundered on the ledges off Eldred Rock is unknown. Reflecting on the accident, the New York Times noted, “The Nevada affair simply emphasized the conditions that prevail in northern waters. Ships of all sorts and conditions are being pressed into the service to carry crowds to the gold fields.” And the Clara Nevada was not the only unfortunate ship that year. Thirty-three others wrecked along Alaska’s southeastern coast in 1898.
This dreadful record of disaster spurred demands that the government take additional steps to ensure the safety of ships traveling Alaska’s breathtakingly scenic but too often deadly marine highway. As a result the congressional funding spigot finally opened during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, and the board built the first two lighthouses in Alaska in 1902—the Five Finger Island Lighthouse, located south of Juneau in Frederick Sound, and the Sentinel Island Lighthouse, between Juneau and Skagway. A lighthouse on Eldred Rock, a sliver of an island located in the Lynn Canal, set against the soaring backdrop of the majestic Chilkat Range, was completed in 1906.
By the end of the decade, there were thirteen Alaskan lighthouses, most along the southeast coast and the Inside Passage. A few were much farther away, including the Scotch Cap Lighthouse (1903) and the Cape Sarichef Lighthouse (1904), which were on opposite sides of Unimak Island at the eastern tip of the Aleutians, a gracefully curving chain of rugged volcanic islands stretching more than one thousand miles from the Alaskan Peninsula into the Pacific Ocean. The Russians called Unimak Island the “roof of hell” on account of its smoke-belching volcanoes. The lighthouses marked Unimak Pass, the main shipping channel from the Pacific into the Bering Sea, which is only about ten miles wide at its narrowest point. This was a particularly dangerous stretch of water, subject to strong currents and thick fog, and the two lighthouses were soon dubbed the “Tombstone Twins” because of the great number of shipwrecks that occurred in the area.
Eldred Rock Lighthouse, circa 1915.
TWO OTHER MAJOR ADDITIONS to the board’s purview were Puerto Rico and Hawaii, both of which became American territories in 1898, during the administration of President William McKinley. Puerto Rico’s annexation came about as a result of that burst of aggressive imperialism known as the Spanish-American War, in which the United States easily and soundly defeated Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines, and effectively ended Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. In the subsequent Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, the United States wrenched from Spain not only Puerto Rico, but also the Philippines and Guam. In contrast, the American takeover of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii didn’t require a war, but rather was initiated with a coup, in which a group comprised mainly of American sugar growers, with the tacit support of the United States government, and backed by a threatening contingent of U.S. Marines, ousted Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. The provisional government that took over lobbied hard for the United States to annex Hawaii, which it did five years later, in August 1898, at the tail end of the Spanish-American War, when the strategic value of the Hawaiian Islands rose due to their usefulness as a military base for protecting America’s growing interests in Asia.
The board didn’t take over the responsibility for Puerto Rico’s lighthouses until 1899, one year after the end of the Spanish-American War, and when it did it found that the territory’s lighthouse system was in very good shape. Its thirteen lighthouses had been well built and fitted with Fresnel lenses by the Spaniards. In addition to repairing existing lighthouses, the board established two new lighthouses—one on Mona Island (1900), and the other on Cabras Island (1908)—that ended up being the last two lighthouses built in Puerto Rico.
The board gained the responsibility for Hawaii’s nineteen lighthouses in 1904, and found that they were “generally of a very crude character,” poorly built, and had relatively weak, antiquated lights. The board immediately initiated repairs, upgraded many of the lights with Fresnel lenses, and built new lighthouses, one of the most important of which was located at Makapu‘u Point at the southeastern tip of Oahu, the third largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago. The point is nearly 650 feet high, with jagged lava cliffs plunging precipitously down to the sea. Hawaiians had been clamoring for a lighthouse at this spot since the late 1800s, on account of the many wrecks in the vicinity, but it wasn’t until 1906 that plans for the lighthouse moved ahead. Congress appropriated funds for the lighthouse at the end of June, and just two months later a wreck near Makapu‘u Point confirmed the wisdom of that decision.
Makapu‘u Point Lighthouse atop Makapu‘u Point, Oahu, Hawaii.
In the early morning hours of August 20, 1906, J. W. Saunders, captain of the six-hundred-foot-long American-owned Pacific Mail steamer Manchuria was proceeding slowly not far from Makapu‘u Point, in heavy rain and low visibility. According to Saunders’s later testimony, he mistook one small island for another, and as a result was far closer to the shore than he assumed. As soon as he heard breakers crashing, he shouted the order to reverse the engines. Billowing clouds of smoke belched from the ship’s funnel, as the Manchuria shuddered almost to a complete stop before getting hung up on a reef. The more than two hundred startled but uninjured passengers were safely evacuated, and a few weeks later the badly damaged ship was towed to Honolulu Harbor and repaired. Although Saunders mostly blamed poor visibility for the wreck, he also cited the lack of a lighthouse on Makapu‘u Point as an important contributing factor.
The Makapu‘u Point Lighthouse, located roughly four hundred feet above the water and first lit three years after the accident in 1909, is only forty-six feet tall, but it houses a truly Brobdingnagian hyperradiant lens, the largest type of Fresnel lens ever made. Designed by members of the lighthouse-building Stevenson family and manufactured by Barbier and Company in France, the fourteen-ton lens boasts 1,188 prisms, and is twelve feet high, with an inside diameter of eight feet nine inches. The board had purchased the lens in 1877 and included it as part of the lighthouse exhibit at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—a world’s fair commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery (albeit, one year late), at which forty-six countries assembled and displayed many of their greatest technological and artistic achievements—among which those of the host nation ranked high. People flocked to see the huge lens, helping to make the lighthouse exhibit one of the most popular at the fair. The lens was then placed in storage until the board installed it at Makapu‘u Point. Very few hyperradiant lenses were manufactured, and the one at Makapu‘u Point is the only one ever used in the United States.
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IN THE SPAN OF nearly sixty years, the board had transformed America’s lighthouse establishment from one that was widely ridiculed during Pleasonton’s reign into one that was among the best in the world, and by far the largest, both in terms of the number of navigational aides and the territory they covered. The more than 2,500 buoys, smaller beacons, and lightships that existed when Pleasonton was sacked in 1852 had mushroomed to nearly 11,000 by 1910. At the same time the number of lighthouses had risen from 325 to about 800, the majority of which were outfitted with the most up-to-date and effective illumination technology known to man, and operated by professional and competent keepers. The board employed around five thousand people—roughly fifteen hundred of whom were lighthouse keepers. Its far-flung network of navigational aids stretched over tens of thousands of miles of coastline and rivers, the result being that most of the dark spots that had long bedeviled mariners had been illuminated. This dramatic expansion mirrored and contributed to the phenomenal growth of the United States, which had transformed America into the world’s largest industrial, economic, and agricultural power by the early 1900s.
New London Ledge Lighthouse, New London, Connecticut, which was built in 1909.
Despite this great success, however, there was widespread concern that the lighthouse establishment had become too unwieldy for the board to manage effectively. Instead of an unpaid, nine-member organization with diffuse responsibility, which met only four times a year, many argued that what was needed was a centralized authority with a full-time chief executive at its helm to manage day-to-day operations and focus more tellingly on increasing efficiency and reducing operational costs. Another problem with the board was the role of navy and army personnel, who constituted seven of the nine members and also served as lighthouse inspectors (navy) and engineers (army) in the lighthouse districts. Although the branches had worked together well for many years, over time there had been increasing friction and disputes between the two groups, as each jockeyed to exercise control over administrative decisions and projects.
President William Howard Taft shared these concerns. In his 1909 Annual Message to Congress he urged the legislators to completely reorganize the lighthouse establishment. Congress did so the following year, abolishing the board, and replacing it with a civilian Bureau of Lighthouses located in the Department of Commerce and Labor (which became the Department of Commerce in 1913). A single individual, the commissioner of lighthouses, headed the bureau, more commonly known as the Lighthouse Service. Lighthouse inspectors were to be culled from civilian ranks, and although army engineers could still consult on and oversee construction and repair projects, they reported directly to the civilian inspectors.
In June 1910 Taft chose George Rockwell Putnam as the first commissioner of lighthouses. Forty-five years old, Putnam was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1865 and grew up in a large family, in a house located on a bluff overlooking the banks of the Mississippi. Curious and adventuresome, he built a canoe to explore the mighty river, which, he said, “rolled in an irresistible magic current through the days of ” his youth. After high school he briefly worked as a surveyor, studied law for while, and then spent two years at a desk job in a Chicago railroad office before enrolling at the Rose Polytechnic Institute in Indiana.
George R. Putnam, the first commissioner of lighthouses.
Engineering degree in hand, Putnam—now a dapper, confident, and good-looking young man sporting a neatly clipped mustache—got a job at the Coast and Geodetic Survey, where he spent the next twenty years. This work took him to nearly every state in the Union, as well as the “bitter wastes of the Far North,” and the “balmy warmth of the Far East.” One of his most exciting assignments came in 1896–97, when he accompanied the intrepid explorer and naval officer Robert E. Peary to Greenland. While Putnam conducted magnetism and gravity experiments, Peary—who would later become embroiled in a heated controversy over his still-contested claim to have discovered the North Pole—focused his energies on digging up and bringing back to America the 4.5 billion-year-old Ahnighito, which at the time was the world’s largest iron meteorite, tipping the scales at thirty-four tons.
After his adventures in Greenland, Putnam went on multiple voyages to Alaska; then, in 1900, he was sent to the Philippines, which had recently become an American territory as a result of the Spanish-American War. As director of the Coast and Geodetic Survey in the Philippines, Putnam oversaw the mapping of this extensive archipelago, only reluctantly returning to another survey job in Washington in 1906. It was in the Philippines that Putnam had met future president Taft, who became the territory’s first civil governor in July 1901. Impressed by Putnam’s administrative and technical skills, dedication, and work ethic, Taft had no qualms appointing him commissioner of lighthouses. According to Putnam, shortly after he got the job, Taft briefly met with him, and he “made no other stipulation than that he wanted the work done so well as to justify the new law.”
PUTNAM’S PASSION FOR THE Lighthouse Service’s work was undeniable. “The lighthouse and the lightship,” he wrote, “appeal to the interest and better instinct of man because they are symbolic of never-ceasing watchfulness, of steadfast endurance in every exposure, of widespread helpfulness. The building and the keeping of the lights is a picturesque and humanitarian work of the nation.” During his twenty-five-year tenure, Putnam’s sought to preserve America’s position as one of the best lighthouse establishments in the world, while modernizing the system and reducing expenditures.
Putnam strove to take the fullest advantage of new technologies, such as radio beacons, which could transmit radio signals in Morse code hundred of miles. With the installation of radio beacons at lighthouses, mariners with radio compasses on their ships could pick up the signals and determine their position relative to a lighthouse well before the lighthouse’s beam could be seen or its fog signal heard, allowing mariners to accurately and safely plot their course. And if mariners were able to pick up signals from two radio beacons, they could use triangulation to pinpoint exactly where they were on the water. Radio beacons were particularly valuable during bad weather. As Putnam observed, “Only the radio signal penetrates the fog and rain which may blot out a light, however brilliant; it alone is unaffected by the roar of the storm which drowns the sound of the most powerful [fog] signal.” Putnam began installing radio beacons at lighthouses and on lightships in 1921, and by the mid-1930s more than one hundred were in operation. Evidence of their effectiveness can be gleaned from the Great Lakes, where the number of vessels that stranded in the four years after radio beacons were installed was 50 percent less than the number that did so in the four years prior.
Putnam was also a strong advocate of electrification, which was rapidly sweeping the country, lighting cities and rural communities alike and powering the nation’s ever-expanding industrial base. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Thomas Alva Edison in his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he experimented with thousands of lightbulb filaments before finding ones that could burn for an extended period of time, America was becoming increasingly illuminated with the warm glow of incandescent lights. These not only often replaced the harsh glare of carbon arc lamps, but also spread the benefits of artificial light throughout society, thus spurring economic development while at the same time dramatically improving the quality of life for large numbers of Americans. The board had tentatively begun converting lighthouses to electricity around the turn of the century, and Putnam greatly accelerated that process. Relying on generators, batteries, and an expanding network of power lines, an ever-growing number of lighthouses were electrified, and by the 1930s the majority of them were lit with electric lamps using incandescent bulbs that were considerably brighter than the lights they replaced.
Electrification helped Putnam move ahead with lighthouse automation, a key part of his strategy to reduce costs. Innovative timers that turned lights on and off according to a preset schedule, along with electric devices for operating smaller fog signals, made it possible for many lighthouses to run on their own, a process that was facilitated by the use of lightbulb changers that automatically replaced burned-out bulbs with new ones.
But it was not only electrification that led to increased automation. About the same time as Putnam was appointed, acetylene gas began to be used as a lighthouse illuminant. The gas, fed to the lamp from a pressurized tank, was mixed with air and burned under a mantle, in the same manner as kerosene was burned in an IOV lamp. With the addition of an ingenious device called a sun valve, lights fueled by acetylene could be run automatically.
The Swedish engineer Nils Gustaf Dalén invented the sun valve in 1907, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1912. The valve was composed of four metal rods enclosed in a glass tube. The central rod had a dull, black, heat-absorbing surface, and was connected to a valve that controlled the flow of acetylene from the tank. The other three rods, which supported the black rod, were gilded, highly polished, and heat resistant. During daylight hours, while the outer rods stayed relatively cool, the black rod absorbed solar radiation (heat) and expanded, thereby closing the valve and extinguishing the lamp. As the daylight diminished and the black rod cooled, it contracted, opening the valve and letting the gas flow freely to the lamp, where a continually burning pilot ignited the gas. Sun valves, combined with acetylene tanks and automatic mantle changers, were particularly useful for automating remote lighthouses that couldn’t easily be supplied with electricity, or where it was difficult to maintain keepers.
Automation was a great financial boon. A single keeper could in some instances run lighthouses that formerly required multiple keepers, and many automated lighthouses didn’t need a keeper at all (although they would still have to be visited periodically for maintenance). During Putnam’s tenure, hundreds of lighthouses were automated, resulting in annual savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On the other hand, automation could have been an unmitigated disaster for the keepers whose jobs were being eliminated, had it not been for Putnam’s obvious concern for their well-being. By proceeding cautiously and planning appropriately, Putnam avoided layoffs by transferring displaced keepers to other lighthouses that had vacancies. But the trend was clear: Automation was the wave of the future, and Putnam had begun a process that would ultimately do away with the keeper’s profession entirely, forever relegating it to being a relic of the more romantic past.
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PUTNAM’S RELUCTANCE TO FIRE the displaced reflected his deep respect for the keepers themselves. “Although the pay is small, the life sometimes lonely, and the work often hazardous,” Putnam wrote, “the Lighthouse Service attracts an excellent class of faithful men,§ willing to take large risks in doing their duty and in helping others in distress.” With each passing year Putnam grew more impressed with keepers’ devotion to their jobs, and he claimed that there were only a few instances in which his confidence was misplaced. Viewing them as the backbone of the service, he firmly believed that they should be treated fairly. This perspective led him to fight on their behalf on a number of important fronts, one of which involved pensions.
When Putnam became commissioner, many keepers were well into their seventies and had been working for many decades. While some of these older keepers no doubt wanted to continue working, most wanted to retire, but they couldn’t afford to because they had no retirement system and therefore were not eligible for a pension. Putnam viewed this as shabby treatment, especially given the immense value to the nation of the keepers’ work, plus the fact that almost all the lighthouse services in other countries provided pensions for their keepers.
The elderly keepers posed a serious dilemma for Putnam, as many of them were getting too old and infirm to perform their job adequately. If he fired them, they might soon be destitute, and if he kept them on, the quality of the Lighthouse Service would eventually suffer. Despite the risks, Putnam decided that he wouldn’t force any keepers to retire until a pension plan was in place. For eight years Putnam used his considerable political connections to lobby Congress to create a retirement plan for keepers, and he was aided in this cause by people from around the country, particularly mariners and newspaper editors in coastal communities, all of whom knew the keepers quite well and could testify that their good work and dedication to saving lives warranted more than a handshake on the way out the door.
These efforts finally bore fruit on June 20, 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation enabling keepers to retire after thirty years of service at age sixty-five, and to collect a generous pension (the mandatory retirement age was seventy). Soon thereafter, not unpredictably, a large number of keepers who had been hoping that this day would arrive cheerfully submitted their resignations. The pension law was both a real coup and a landmark, as it was the first retirement system enacted in the United States for federal civil service workers. At the signing ceremony Wilson remarked to Putnam, “I am heartily glad to have been of any service to the men who served the government in the lighthouses. I know how important their work is and feel that nothing but justice has been done them.”
Just a year later Wilson had good reason to be very thankful for the exemplary work performed by the nation’s keepers, because it may have saved his life. After attending the Paris Peace Conference and signing the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended World War I, Wilson headed back the United States in July 1919 on the ocean liner turned troop transport George Washington. Off the coast of Massachusetts, the 723-foot-long steamer encountered dense fog that reduced visibility to near zero. Unaware of his exact location, and oblivious to the danger that lay directly ahead, the captain had no idea that his ship was on a collision course, plowing straight toward the jagged, rocky shore of Thacher Island. In such miserable conditions the bright beams of Thacher Island’s twin light were utterly useless, but the sonorous blasts from its foghorn were finally heard by the sailor on watch, who immediately informed the captain, giving him enough time to change course and avoid certain disaster.
USING THE SAME DRIVE he employed in the pension battle, Putnam helped persuade Congress to provide disability benefits to keepers who were disabled by disease or injury, as long as the impairment was not “due to vicious habits, intemperance, or willful misconduct.” And the families of keepers who died in the line of duty were finally able to collect survivors’ benefits. Putnam also threw down the gauntlet on an issue that had long troubled keepers—their pay.
Keepers began complaining about their pay almost as soon as the federal government took over the responsibility for lighthouses, and when Putnam arrived on the scene they were still complaining. The average annual pay for a keeper in 1840 was four hundred dollars. In 1867 it rose to six hundred, where it stayed for fifty years. In contrast, by 1900 the average federal worker was earning roughly a thousand dollars per year. These keepers’ salaries being averages, there were those who got more or less, depending on the circumstances, and of course head keepers received higher pay than assistants. For example, in the 1850s, when gold fever had blistered people’s minds, head keepers on the west coast were paid a thousand dollars because that was necessary in a hyperinflated market in which a domestic servant or lowly clerk might earn nearly that much. (In later years, however, west coast keepers’ salaries were reduced, though they remained still higher than most places in the country.) Keepers at particularly isolated or dangerous lighthouses, or those that were more difficult to run by virtue of their size or complexity, were also paid on the upper end of the scale. And on the Great Lakes, where most lighthouses were closed during the winter months when the ice made ship traffic impossible, keepers would often be paid less than the average. Of course keepers got many other benefits besides pay, including rent-free housing and a variety of supplies provided by the government periodically throughout the year, including food at remote locations. Nevertheless, no matter where it fell on the spectrum, keepers’ pay was never munificent, and when it stagnated for fifty years that only exacerbated their situation.
Putnam believed keepers should be paid more, not only to benefit those already in the service but also to ensure that salaries remained competitive enough to hire competent people. Year after year Putnam pleaded for keepers’ pay to be increased, and many keepers themselves submitted petitions urging the same. At last Congress responded, and in 1918 the average annual keeper’s pay climbed to $840. In subsequent years there were other raises, and by the early 1930s keepers’ salaries ranged from $1,080 all the way up to $2,100. Though still not extravagant, the pay scale was certainly very welcome, especially during the Great Depression when so many people were out of work.
AT THE SAME TIME that the supportive Putnam was fighting to improve the financial status of keepers, he was also forcing them to be thrifty. According to the historian Hans Christian Adamson, the “Lighthouse Bureau was not only dollar conscious; it was actually penny-pinching. Save, stretch, and substitute had become a policy and a creed.” The detailed stories of keepers being asked to be frugal were legendary. It was not uncommon for paintbrushes to be used until they were worn down to the nubs, chipped screwdrivers to be filed back into shape, or used lens-cleaning rags to be repurposed to patch clothes. One lighthouse district superintendent, upon learning that a keeper was going to throw out a can opener with a broken blade, put an immediate halt to such wastefulness. “Well,” the superintendent said, “the corkscrew on it is all right. It could still be used for opening a bottle. And I don’t mean a bottle of wine!” In the course of saving money, sometimes the bureau allowed the secondary buildings at lighthouses, such as the keeper’s quarters, to deteriorate. Given his emphasis on thriftiness, it is not surprising that Putnam had a picture of Stephen Pleasonton hung prominently in his office. But there was a major difference between Putnam’s and Pleasonton’s economies: Unlike Pleasonton, Putnam had an extremely competent workforce beneath him, and he never let his cost-cutting efforts diminish the quality of the navigational aids that mariners relied on.
Most keepers didn’t seem to mind Putnam’s frugality, and in fact many took a measure of pride in making do with less, and in being creative when it came to solving problems. And that pride extended to their broader job as well. Putnam made keepers feel that their work was important, and he frequently expressed his faith in them, both privately and publicly. They, in turn, had great admiration for and loyalty to their commissioner, who had done so much to improve their lives, and had made them feel good about being in government service.
Putnam also imbued his workforce with a shared sense of pride, community, and professionalism by awarding efficiency stars to keepers, and launching the Lighthouse Service Bulletin, a monthly newsletter that provided informative and entertaining reading material. Articles covered a great range of topics, including technological advances, legislative developments, new construction projects, and retirements. Some of the coverage was more lighthearted, such as when the bulletin offered recipes or shared a humorous anecdote. In the May 1921 issue, for example, L. D. Marchant, a keeper who had worked at three lighthouses in Chesapeake Bay for more than thirty-eight years, yet had never been sick for a single day, was asked how he achieved that remarkable record. “The secret of my good health,” he replied, “is that I have been where the doctors could not get to me.”
Sometimes, however, the stories were tragic. In May and June 1925, the Bulletin told of a horrific accident at the Makapu‘u Point Lighthouse. Early in the morning on April 9 of that year, assistant keepers Alexander Toomey and John Kaohimaunu were getting ready to change the watch. In the process of putting alcohol into the lighter that was used to heat the IOV lamp, a small amount of alcohol dripped on the floor. When Toomey struck a match, the alcohol fumes ignited, causing a fiery explosion. Both keepers were severely burned, but Toomey got the worst of it, his clothes having caught fire, leaving him “charred black and crinkled.” As the head keeper was about to rush the two injured men to the hospital, Toomey’s wife begged to come along. Toomey, however, insisted that she remain at the lighthouse, since with all three keepers gone, she was the only one who could watch the light. According to the Bulletin, before being taken away Toomey gathered his wife and children around him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and then he turned to his wife and said, “Stand by the light and keep it burning.” Those were the last words he and his wife ever shared, for he died the next day.
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JUST AS EARLIER AMERICAN WARS affected lighthouse operations, so too did World War I, and not in an insignificant way. Even before the Declaration of War on April 2, 1917, the U.S. government instructed keepers at primary seacoast lighthouses to keep a “bright lookout” for German submarines and report any sightings. Soon after the declaration, President Wilson transferred twenty-one of those lighthouses and their keepers to the navy for the duration of the war. Navy signalmen were stationed alongside the keepers, and together they maintained a round-the-clock vigil, scanning the horizon for enemy submarines. To help with that task, the government provided a “Submarine Silhouette Book,” which included illustrations depicting German submarine profiles at the surface, as well as photographs of submarines. Keepers at all other seacoast lighthouses, while not under naval supervision, were also instructed to be on the lookout for the enemy. Some lighthouses were darkened or dimmed to avoid having the lighthouses’ beams silhouette American vessels at night, making them easier targets for German submarines. And telephone service was extended to many lighthouses to facilitate quick reporting of sightings or suspicious activity.
Lighthouse keepers also did their part to help alleviate war-related food shortages. In May 1917 President Wilson appointed future president Herbert Hoover head of the newly created United States Food Administration, whose mission was to provide food for American and Allied troops, as well as the American and Allied populations. With the rallying cry “Food Will Win the War,” the Food Administration urged every American to pitch in, and lighthouse keepers were no exception. The secretary of commerce encouraged keepers to cultivate as much land as possible on lighthouse property. Even keepers at lighthouses with virtually unarable land were urged to plant crops, and to spur them on the service published reports of keepers who had succeeded despite formidable obstacles. One example was Henry L. Thomas, the keeper at Nantucket’s Great Point Lighthouse, who was praised for growing “good quality” potatoes in the sand. And at the Turn Point Lighthouse on Stuart Island off the coast of Washington, instead of cultivating the land Louis Borchers, the head keeper, farmed the sea. The waters surrounding the island were teeming with a veritable cornucopia of different fish, which Borchers loved catching and canning. In 1918 alone he preserved 311 cans of fish, including salmon, sardines, and grayfish, as well as salmon caviar. Hoover was greatly impressed by Borchers’s success, and urged other keepers to follow his lead.
Lightships too were enlisted in the war effort, with a few being transferred to the navy, and all of them being required to keep a watchful eye on the horizon for the enemy. The Diamond Shoal Lightship, moored off Cape Hatteras, gave its last measure of service performing this duty. On August 6, 1918, the lightship’s crew saw a German submarine attacking an American merchant vessel, whereupon the lightship’s radio operator alerted other American ships in the area. But the Germans were listening in, and they trained their guns on the lightship. Before sinking it, however, the Germans allowed its twelve-member crew to escape in lifeboats. The lightship’s warnings, however, had not been in vain. At least twenty-five American ships heard them, and headed inshore, out of range of the prowling German submarine.
WHEN PUTNAM RETIRED IN 1935 at age seventy, in the midst of the deepest depression the country has ever experienced, he was proud of his achievements—and he had every right to be. During his tenure the number of navigational aids had more than doubled—including the addition of many new lighthouses—while at the same time the number of people working for the service had been reduced by about 15 percent. Much of that reduction was due to automation, which enabled hundreds of lighthouses to operate without keepers, thereby launching a trend that served as a harbinger of the future, a time when keepers would no longer be needed at all. Not only had the Lighthouse Service become more efficient, it had also become more effective in carrying out its primary mission of safeguarding the nation’s waters. According to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, between 1920 and 1935 the United States rose from being the sixth safest country in the world, measured by the percentage of ships lost in maritime accidents, to the second safest, with only the Dutch having a better record. Yet another measure of Putnam’s success is the sense of pride and accomplishment he instilled in his employees for a job well done. The morale among keepers in particular had never been higher. The New York Times offered a fitting coda to Putnam’s career in its editorial announcing his retirement: “He was one of those quiet, capable, hardworking chiefs of the permanent government service of whom the general public hears little, but to whom it owes much. When you think of men of his character and devotion, the word ‘bureaucracy’ loses its sting.”
Harold. D. King, an engineer who had twenty-four years’ experience working in the Lighthouse Service and had most recently been the deputy commissioner for lighthouses, succeeded Putnam. King had known Putnam since their days working together for the Coast and Geodetic Survey in the Philippines, and he looked forward to further modernizing the service. But he had a only short time to make his mark, for in 1939 the Lighthouse Service was transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard, inaugurating the modern era of lighthouse history. Before getting to the modern era, however, it is important to circle back to what has often been called the golden age of lighthouses—the period from the inception of the Lighthouse Board in 1852 up through the last days of the Lighthouse Service. It was during those decades that the lighthouse system experienced its greatest expansion, and America’s lighthouses, both literally and metaphorically, shone brighter than ever before. It was also a time when many of the most fascinating and, at times, heartwrenching stories in the history of lighthouses took place—stories about keepers and their lives, dramatic rescues, marvels of engineering and construction, birds, and a particularly deadly hurricane.
* This price includes the expense of delivery to the lighthouses.
† Colza oil is a close relative of canola oil, which was developed in Canada in the late twentieth century.
‡ Similarly, the expression “mad as a hatter” originated in eighteenth-century England, where mercury was used in the hatmaking process.
§ Typical of his time, Putnam wrote “men” although there were already some female keepers.
