Light Hearted

The lighthouse at Piney Point in Maryland –14 miles from Chesapeake Bay up the Potomac River — was established in 1836, making it the oldest lighthouse on the river. The conical brick tower is 26 feet tall. Piney Point Light Station, Maryland. U.S. Lighthouse Society photo by J. Candace Clifford. April Havens In 1980 the property was transferred to St. Mary’s County. The County license...

Listen to the podcast using this player: Ireland’s Hook Lighthouse is the oldest continuously operating lighthouse in the world. The tapering headland of Hook Head is in the southwestern part of County Wexford, on the southeast coast of Ireland below Dublin. In the fifth century, a monastery was established on the peninsula. According to tradition, the early monks from the monastery erected a beac...

Listen using this player: Eighteen-acre Rose Island , about a mile offshore from Newport, Rhode Island, has a commanding position in Narragansett Bay’s East Passage. The waters around Newport were busy with passenger steamers, fishing boats, and freighters in the mid-nineteenth century. On July 20, 1868, Congress appropriated $7,500 for a lighthouse on the island, and the site chosen was a s...

Boon Island is located in southern Maine, about six miles from the nearest point of land. The popular writer Celia Thaxter once called the small rocky island “the forlornest place that can be imagined.” It was the scene of many shipwrecks over the years, including the wreck of the British Nottingham Galley in December 1710, an incident that was later the basis of a novel by Kenneth Roberts. Undate...

Use this player to listen to the podcast: In the late 1860s, the hazard known as the Middle Ground Flats — opposite the City of Hudson, New York, in the Hudson River —made navigation in the busy shipping route treacherous. An appropriation of $35,000.00 was approved by Congress in 1872 to build the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse. The lighthouse went into service in late 1874. It was run by a resident ke...

Listen to the podcast with this player: The Bonavista Peninsula is on the east coast of Newfoundland, Canada, separating Trinity Bay to the south from Bonavista Bay to the north. At the peninsula’s northeastern tip is the headland known as Cape Bonavista. It’s believed that the navigator Giovanne Caboto, better known as John Cabot, may have landed at the cape during his first expedition to North A...

Listen to the podcast using this player: Wave-swept Bell Rock Lighthouse, about five miles from Arbroath in southeastern Scotland, was designed by the engineer Robert Stevenson of the famous Stevenson family of engineers. The granite tower, first lighted in 1811, was built so well that none of it has needed to be repaired or replaced in more than 200 years. It’s the oldest wave-swept, or sea-washe...

Listen with this player: Litløy fyr, on a small island off the northwest coast of Norway, was first lit in October 1912. For a time, it was the second most powerful lighthouse in Norway. The lighthouse was electrified in 1959 and then automated in 1991. Staff remained at the light station to maintain the property and to run a weather station. Eventually the staff was removed in 2003. Then, a coupl...

From the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the waterways of coastal Georgia, from the St. Marys River in the south to the Savannah River in the north, were a vital part of the state’s economy. Georgia’s barrier islands are home to five existing lighthouses, each with its own unique style and history. William Rawlings Lighthouses of the Georgia Coast is the eleventh...

Listen to the podcast with this player: On one side of North Carolina’s Bald Head Island, the Cape Fear River empties into the Atlantic Ocean. On the other, treacherous sand bars known as the Frying Pan Shoals stretch to the south for about 30 miles into the ocean. The island’s first lighthouse was established in 1794. The original lighthouse was soon threatened by erosion, and it was...

Located at the eastern tip of Long Island, Montauk Point Light is the oldest lighthouse in New York and the fourth oldest active lighthouse in the country. Construction began in 1796 and was completed in the following year. When the light station was automated and de-staffed in 1987, a museum opened in the keeper’s house, operated by the Montauk Historical Society . Then, in 1996, ownership of the...

Listen to the podcast episode with this player: Dianna Stampfler Dianna Stampfler has written countless articles for many Michigan travel and culture periodicals. In August 2004, she launched Promote Michigan to help market the people, places, and products of her home state. Dianna has also been researching Michigan’s lighthouses for more than 10 years. In 2019, she published her book Michigan’s H...

The Amateur Radio Lighthouse Society, or ARLHS , was formed in 2000. The ARLHS is devoted to maritime communications, amateur radio, lighthouses, and lightships. Its members travel to lighthouses around the world where they operate amateur radio equipment at or near the light stations. Other goals of the ARLHS include working to increase public awareness of the role ham radio and lighthouses have...

The light station on East Brother Island in Richmond, California, was established in 1874 . After nearly a century as a staffed light station, East Brother was automated and destaffed in the summer of 1969. The building deteriorated for a decade until the Coast Guard granted a license for restoration to a new nonprofit organization, East Brother Light Station, Inc. The property was restored and ev...

Listen to the podcast with this player: The lighthouse at Sumburgh Head, established in 1821, is the oldest lighthouse in the Shetland Islands, a part of Scotland. The light station is on a dramatic promontory at the southern tip of Mainland, Shetland, the largest of the islands and the fifth largest island in the British Isles. It was designed by Robert Stevenson, one of the most prolific and cel...

Listen to the podcast with this player: This is part two of two episodes about Pater Noster Lighthouse off the west coast of Sweden. The light station is operated as a small hotel that features rooms with a sea view, a restaurant, and three boathouses for dinner and conferences. The lighthouse hotel has formed a partnership with the Göteborg (or Gothenberg) Film Festival . The festival, which bega...

You can listen to the podcast with this player: Pater Noster is a small archipelago off the west coast of Sweden. The island group’s name, which means “The Lord’s Prayer,” is said to come from the tradition that mariners would recite the Lord’s Prayer as they negotiated their way around the dangerous reefs in the vicinity. The 105-foot-tall cast-iron lighthouse on one of the islands was constructe...

Listen to the podcast with this player: Pointe-au-Père is near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and about 160 miles northeast of Quebec City, Canada. For many years, river pilots helped incoming vessels to steer safely toward Quebec City. The Montreal Ocean Steamship Company established the first lighthouse and foghorn on Pointe-au-Père in 1859. The government of Canada purchased the lighthouse...

Both of the lighthouses featured in this episode are celebrating their 150th anniversaries in 2021. Souter Lighthouse is on the northeast coast of England, in South Shields, Tyne and Wear. A lighthouse was much needed here because of dangerous reefs offshore. When the light went into operation on January 11, 1871, it was one of the first lighthouses in the world to be built specifically to operate...

Angeli Perrow Angeli Perrow was born in Rockland on the Maine coast. Her grandfather was a lobsterman and her uncle fished the Grand Banks. As a child, Angeli delighted in exploring the beach with her grandmother, collecting shells and sea glass. She also started writing poems and stories when she was a child. Angeli taught elementary school for 30 years before retiring two years ago. Maine’...

Patos Island is the northernmost of the San Juan Islands in the state of Washington. The 207-acre island is in the Strait of Georgia, just two miles from the Canadian border. A light and fog signal station was established in 1893 on Alden Point, the northwestern tip of the island, and a more substantial lighthouse building was added in 1908. Patos Island Lighthouse, U.S. Lighthouse Society photo....

Use this player to hear the podcast: The Titanic Memorial Lighthouse stands today near the buildings of the South Street Seaport Museum, at the corner of Fulton and Pearl streets at the southern end of Manhattan. From 1913 to 1968, it was a familiar sight in its location atop the Seaman’s Church Institute, overlooking the East River. The cornerstone for the lighthouse was laid on April 16, 1912, o...

Sandy Neck is a half-mile wide, six-mile long peninsula on the north side of Cape Cod, marking the entrance to Barnstable Harbor as well as the approach to the small harbor at Yarmouthport. A light station at the eastern tip of Sandy Neck went into service on October 1, 1826. The original lighthouse was replaced in 1857 by the 48-foot brick tower that still stands. Sandy Neck Light Station circa 1...

Use this player to listen to the podcast episode: The brightly striped red and white tower on Sambro Island, near Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, is the oldest lighthouse in the Americas. The first act passed by the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, on October 2, 1758, authorized the lighthouse. It was paid for by a tax on vessels entering Halifax Harbour. The station was automated and destaffed in 198...

Use this player to listen to the podcast episode: Tybee Island Light Station in 2009. U.S. Lighthouse Society photo by J. Candace Clifford. Tybee Island’s Lighthouse is the oldest and tallest in Georgia, and it’s one of the most intact historic light stations in the U.S. Sarah Jones The Savannah River marks the border between Georgia and South Carolina. The river was vital to the early...