Light Hearted

The Flying Santa is a tradition that dates back to 1929, serving to express gratitude to lighthouse keepers, Coast Guard personnel, and their families through Yuletide visits by plane or helicopter. The tradition was started by Captain William Wincapaw, a pioneering Maine aviator. To show his appreciation for the people at the lighthouses in Midcoast Maine, he loaded up his seaplane with packages...

Hilton Head Island, or simply Hilton Head, is a barrier island about 20 miles northeast of Savannah, Georgia, and 95 miles southwest of Charleston, South Carolina. The island features 12 miles of beaches and is a popular vacation destination. It’s also a golf mecca with 33 courses on the island. Harbour Town Lighthouse, South Carolina. Photo by Jeremy D’Entremont. The Harbour Town Lighthouse...

St. Simons is part of a cluster of barrier islands located off the southeastern Georgia coast. The original lighthouse on St. Simons was a 75-foot-tall tower that was built in 1810. When Confederate troops retreated from the area in 1861, they blew up the lighthouse so it wouldn’t serve as an aid to navigation for Union warships. The 104-foot-tall brick tower that stands today was built between 18...

The Isles of Shoals are a cluster of nine islands located several miles off the seacoast of New Hampshire and southern Maine. A lighthouse on White Island — the southernmost of the island group — went into service in early 1821. It was a stone tower, later encased with wood and shingled. A new 58-foot brick lighthouse tower was built on White Island in 1859, and the new tower was fitte...

Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, is the third-largest island on the East Coast of the United States, with a land area of about 96 square miles. Five lighthouses were established on the island, beginning with Gay Head Light in 1799. The Martha’s Vineyard Museum. Photo by Jeremy D’Entremont. The Martha’s Vineyard Museum was originally incorporated in the 1920s as the Dukes County...

Stannard Rock Lighthouse in Michigan was nicknamed by its keepers “the loneliest place in the world.” Coast Guard keepers called it “Stranded Rock.” Located about 24 miles from the nearest shore on Lake Superior, it’s the most isolated light station in the United States. The construction of the lighthouse took 240,000 tons of rock and iron, and took five years to complete. With a rotating second-o...

Port Clyde, one of the villages that comprise the town of St. George in Midcoast Maine, became a busy port in the 1800s with granite quarries, tide mills for sawing timber, shipbuilding facilities, and fish canning businesses. To help mariners entering the harbor or passing to the west into Muscongus Bay, Congress appropriated funds for a light station at Marshall Point in 1831 and a rubblestone l...

Ron Kolek Ron Kolek is the founder and lead investigator of the New England Ghost Project . His exploits have been documented in many newspaper, television, radio, and magazine articles. Ron is the host of the popular   Ghost Chronicles Radio series. He’s a well-known lecturer and he’s taught  Paranormal CSI at Northern Essex Community College. Ron has conducted paranormal inve...

Debbie Mueller is an award-winning oil painter whose light-filled, bold, and contemporary paintings have rapidly gained prominence in the community of New England artists since she began to paint in 2016. Debbie’s work is available through the Mast Cove Gallery in Kennebunkport, Maine; Kennedy Gallery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and the Cortile Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Debbie Muel...

This is part two of a three-part interview with the Irish lighthouse keeper and author Gerald Butler. Gerald is the co-author of the classic book The Lightkeeper: A Memoir . A third generation lighthouse keeper on both sides, Gerald Butler went to work for the Commissioners of Irish Lights in 1969. He spent most of his career as an assistant keeper on the Bull Rock, Fastnet Rock, Old Head of Kinsa...

Gerald Butler, a third-generation lighthouse keeper on both sides of his family, joined the Commissioners of Irish Lights in 1969. He spent most of his light-keeping career as an assistant keeper on Bull Rock, Fastnet Rock, the Old Head of Kinsale, and Mizen Head lighthouses. During his 21 years of service he also served on 17 other lighthouses. Gerald Butler Gerald was born in 1950 in southwester...

The Elizabeth Islands are a chain of small islands that extend about 16 miles to the southwest from the southern coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There are seven major islands in the chain. Naushon Island is the largest at 7.4 square miles. Tarpaulin Cove, on the east side of the island, was a place where seamen traveling through Vineyard Sound often stopped for a meal or a night’s stay at...

Cape Otway Lighthouse — in southern Victoria, Australia, about 50 miles southwest of Melbourne — is nicknamed the “Beacon of Hope.”  For thousands of immigrants in the 1800s, Cape Otway was the first sight of land after leaving Europe, Asia, and North America. It’s the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Australian mainland and it’s also considered the most significant. 19th c...

Funds were appropriated for a lighthouse at the entrance to Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie in 1819, and the limestone tower went into service in 1822. It was originally known as the Sandusky Light; the name Marblehead came into use later. The tower was raised 15 feet to its present height of 65 feet in 1898 and the light was automated in 1958. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources now owns the light...

Bessida Cauthorne White Stingray Point Lighthouse in Virginia, built in 1858, marked a dangerous shoal at the mouth of the Rappahannock River. In 1861, six enslaved men used the lighthouse – which was abandoned during the Civil War — as a safe house while waiting to catch a Union ship that would allow them to escape slavery. Bessida Cauthorne White is an activist, genealogist, and retired at...

Andy Robinson is a junior at Palo Alto High School in California, and he’s a co-chair for the Teen Advisory Council of the Palo Alto History Museum, where he helped create a historical time capsule of his city. Andy has also been a volunteer for the U.S. Lighthouse Society’s passport program, helping to update information on stamp locations and events. He’s written histories for a series of collec...

Point Sur juts out from a rugged portion of the California coast 25 miles south of Monterey Bay. The Lighthouse Board had considered a lighthouse at Point Sur as early as 1856, but the terrain was daunting. Point Sur, photo by Jeremy D’Entremont. Congress finally appropriated $50,000 in 1886 and another $50,000 in the following year. Stone for the buildings was quarried near the site, and a...

Josh Liller Josh Liller has been the Historian and Collections Manager for the Loxahatchee River Historical Society and the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse & Museum in Florida since 2014. Jupiter Inlet Light Station has a museum on the site that features 5000 years of local history. Josh also serves as historian for the Florida Lighthouse Association , and he gives presentations related to local hist...

Block Island, south of the Rhode Island coast and east of the entrance to Long Island Sound, lies in the middle of major shipping lanes.  A lighthouse was established at the island’s northernmost point in 1829, but it did nothing to aid vessels heading past the south side of the island. Congress appropriated $75,000 for a first-order light and fog signal in 1872, and a brick dwelling and atta...

Early photo of Bass River Lighthouse, Massachusetts (National Archives) Congress appropriated $4,000 for a lighthouse near the mouth of the Bass River on Cape Cod in 1850. Oxen hauled building materials across the local marshes, and the Bass River Light went into service on April 30, 1855. The government deemed the lighthouse unnecessary after the advent of the Cape Cod Canal and a new automatic l...

The Outer Banks, a 200-mile-long chain of barrier islands, stretch from southeastern Virginia to most of the North Carolina coast. The islands were a haven for piracy in the 1600s, but later an important commercial fishing industry developed in the region. Currituck Beach Lighthouse—the northernmost of the light stations on the Outer Banks—began service on December 1, 1875, to fill a 40-mile gap o...

Orient Point Lighthouse is a cast-iron, so-called “sparkplug” type lighthouse in a location known as Plum Gut, between Plum Island and Orient Point at the northeastern tip of Long Island, New York. After its 1958 automation, the Coast Guard considered tearing it down and replacing it with a simple pipe tower, but a public outcry saved the structure and some restoration work was carried out. ...

Elinor DeWire at Cape Meares Lighthouse, Oregon Elinor DeWire is an award-winning author, editor, public speaker, educator, and blogger based in Connecticut. She began her writing career with freelance stories for a Florida newspaper, and in 1987 she published her first book, Guide to Florida Lighthouses . Since then, she’s authored some twenty books about lighthouses. From 1991 to 2000 Elino...

Point Cabrillo is in Northern California, about midway between San Francisco and the border with Oregon. The point is named for Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, an explorer who sailed the California coast on behalf of Spain in 1542 and ‘43. It took a series of shipwrecks in the vicinity and pleas from mill owners and mariners before construction of a lighthouse began in the summer of 1908. An octagonal li...

Use this player to listen to the podcast: Chris Overcash Chris Overcash is the Senior Engineer and Deputy Director of Coastal Resilience for EA Engineering, Science, and Technology in Maryland. Chris has more than 20 years of experience in the fields of coastal, civil, and environmental engineering. His background includes projects in marine and coastal design, dredging, and resource management, a...