Boston Lighthouse in 2015, after extensive renovations and repairs in advance of the lighthouse’s tricentennial celebration in 2016.
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Boston Lighthouse in 2015, after extensive renovations and repairs in advance of the lighthouse’s tricentennial celebration in 2016.
ON ONE OF THOSE QUINTESSENTIALLY HOT BUT EVER SO BREEZY days in early July, I decided to take a break from my research and go on a brief journey through America’s lighthouse history. Early that morning I drove from my house in Marblehead to Boston to visit the Boston Lighthouse, where that history dramatically begins. But first I had to get there. I bought a ticket to take the boat tour to Little Brewster Island, which is one of thirty-four islands that form the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service.*
During the forty-five-minute trip to the island, a National Park Service ranger regaled the passengers, most decked in shorts and sun visors, with captivating stories about the harbor’s history, heavy emphasis being placed on the harbor’s polluted past and the multibillion-dollar cleanup effort that brought it back to life. Toward the end of our short voyage, the Boston Lighthouse, a bright white sentinel standing watch over the harbor’s mouth, loomed ever larger, until it dominated the scene and commanded the attention of all on board.
The boat docked, we got off, and were warmly welcomed by a woman wearing a long dress and a bonnet, such as would have been worn by the keeper’s wife in 1783, when the current lighthouse was built. This vision from the past was Dr. Sally Snowman, a historian and Coast Guard auxiliarist, who has been the lighthouse’s keeper since 2003. She presented a fascinating introduction to the island and the lighthouse’s history, and then sent us on our way to explore.
I immediately walked to the lighthouse tower, eagerly anticipating the climb to the lantern room, which houses a second-order Fresnel lens. Along the way a jumble of complicated thoughts and images flooded into my mind. I wondered what George Worthylake, the first keeper, looked like, and how indescribably stricken his daughter Ann must have been when she saw her father drown on that chilly November day in 1718. Aware of our Revolutionary history, I tried to envision Maj. Benjamin Tupper leading three hundred patriots on their daring raid on the lighthouse in the summer of 1775, getting the best of the inebriated British marines who boasted that they would have no trouble defending the lighthouse against an even larger force. And I thought about the fury that Bostonians must have felt in the spring of 1776 upon learning that the British fleet had blown up their lighthouse before retreating north to the Tory-favorable community in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The lantern room did not disappoint. The eleven-foot-tall two-ton lens, with its 336 glistening prisms and twelve bull’s-eyes, was dazzling, spectacularly gorgeous. I marveled at Fresnel’s genius and reflected on how his invention revolutionized lighthouse illumination. Through the lantern room’s glass panes, I could see the harbor’s entrance and the Atlantic beyond. I could only imagine how many millions of mariners had sailed or motored into the harbor over the years, heaving a sigh of relief when they saw the lighthouse’s gleam or heard the fog signal blaring in the distance.
After exiting the tower, I wandered the grounds, looking at the cannon that served as the country’s first fog signal, as well as the keeper’s quarters. Given my background in marine biology, I could not resist a trip to the edge of the island, where I found a few tide pools teeming with life. With time for the tour over, I boarded the boat for the return trip to Boston, and the next stage in my journey, which took me back to Marblehead and the stately colonial house where Elbridge Gerry was born.
In the summer of 1789, when the inaugural federal Congress met in New York City, it was Gerry who introduced the first draft of the bill that would ultimately result in the federal government’s taking control of the nation’s lighthouses. Standing in front of his family’s house, I felt a twinge of pride knowing that a longtime resident of the town I call home played such a seminal role in the history I was writing about.
My next and final stop was just a short drive away, at the tip of a rocky peninsula called Marblehead Neck, where the Marblehead Lighthouse stands on a promontory next to the entrance to the town’s deep and inviting harbor. There, instead of admiring the lighthouse, I tried to conjure a ghost. The current lighthouse is the second one built on this spot, but I was thinking about the first, finished in 1835 after the citizens of Marblehead had pleaded with the government to build a beacon on this rocky headland to make their “good harbor … easy of access to the care and weather beaten mariner.”
The original lighthouse consisted of a modest two-story keeper’s dwelling and a detached masonry tower that was only twenty-three feet tall, but because of the headland’s elevation, the top of the tower soared nearly sixty feet above mean high water. Ezekiel Darling, the first keeper, enjoyed some local renown, starting with his role as one of the gunners on the USS Constitution during the War of 1812.
Marblehead Lighthouse, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, circa 1890s.
Darling, a relatively short, wiry man, served as keeper until 1860, when he was about seventy years old and nearly blind. Like so many other keepers, he is credited with multiple rescues, the most famous being the time that he and four other “gallant Marblehead men”—as a contemporary newspaper account called them—“put off in a tremendous sea, and brought ashore the officers and crew of the brig John Hancock, which was dashed to pieces on Tinker’s Island in a violent easterly storm, when the snow drifted eight to ten feet deep.”
Darling’s replacement was Jane C. Martin, who had learned her lighthouse-tending skills assisting her father, the keeper at Baker’s Island Lighthouse in the neighboring town of Salem. Martin’s tenure lasted but three years, and soon after she left, the Neck—long thinly settled and used primarily for farming, pasturage, and as a place to dry fish—began changing in ways that would greatly affect the lighthouse’s future. Starting in the late 1860s and accelerating thereafter, wealthy people from Boston and other nearby places began building large summer homes in the area.
By the early 1880s the conspicuously large and often lavish new homes were already overshadowing the diminutive lighthouse. Local mariners complained vociferously that they could no longer see the light on their approach to the harbor. To remedy this problem, in 1883 the Lighthouse Board erected a tall mast next to the lighthouse, which exhibited a lantern that was hoisted into position each night by means of a rope. This temporary beacon served for a decade before the board decided to replace it with something much more effective and substantial. At first the board thought of building a 100-foot-tall brick lighthouse, but instead opted for economy, ordering the construction of a much cheaper, 105-foot-tall cast-iron skeleton tower, which was first lit in 1896.
Present-day Marblehead Lighthouse.
That lighthouse was the one that stood before me now, in the midst of one of Marblehead’s beautiful parks. The tower is painted a dull brown, while the lantern room and surrounding gallery are black. The lighthouse was automated in 1960, when its sixth-order Fresnel lens was replaced with a modern optic, which emits a fixed green light. The lighthouse is still active, and the Coast Guard maintains the light while the town of Marblehead maintains the tower itself.
With this visit to Marblehead Neck, I had come to the end of my daylong journey. It had taken me from the colonial origins of America’s lighthouse history up through the present. And as I sat on one of the park benches and gazed up at the tower, I pondered the profoundly consequential role that this local lighthouse—and all the others ever built in America—played in the nation’s development. They quite literally lit the way for the United States.
* The Boston Light tours are a collaborative effort between National Park Service, the Coast Guard, Boston Harbor Island Alliance, University of Massachusetts Boston, and the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands.