Light Hearted

In 1825, an act of Congress authorized the building of a breakwater off of Cape Henlopen in Delaware to create a protected harbor. The new harbor that was created was called the National Harbor of Refuge. In 1907 a lighthouse at the southern end of the outer breakwater went into service. The original structure was replaced by a 76-foot-tall cast-iron lighthouse in 1926 and automated in 1973. Harbo...

Annamaria Mariotti was born in Camogli, in northern Italy, and she still lives and works there. She is the author of many books, articles, and stories related to the sea. Her passion for lighthouses began with the Capo Sandalo Lighthouse on the Italian island of San Pietro and with the Lighthouse of Genoa. She’s visited many lighthouses in Italy, on the Atlantic coast of the United States, in Cana...

Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse, located offshore from the southern tip of the peninsula where Annapolis, Maryland, is located, is the last surviving screw-pile lighthouse in Chesapeake Bay. The light station was established in 1838 and the current lighthouse was built in 1875. Today, the City of Annapolis owns the lighthouse. The City leases it to the Chesapeake Chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Socie...

Greens Ledge is one of several treacherous formations near Norwalk Harbor in Connecticut. Congress appropriated $60,000 for the establishment of a light and fog signal at Greens Ledge in 1899, and the 52-foot lighthouse was finished in 1902. Greens Ledge is a cast-iron tower on a cylindrical cast-iron concrete-filled foundation, typical of offshore “sparkplug” lights built in the late...

Shona Riddell Shona Riddell, who lives in New Zealand, has been writing for as long as she can remember. Both of her parents were writers, and Shona’s first article was published in 2000 in the New Zealand Herald. She was hooked, and in 2002 she completed a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from the Auckland University of Technology.  Since then she’s worked as a magazine writer, web writer and...

From the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s, Nantucket was the world’s leading whaling port. But the island’s east and south coasts remained devoid of lighthouses well into the 1800s, in spite of the high volume of shipping traffic passing the island and the presence of dangerous shoals offshore. Finally, in the late 1840s, a bluff at Sankaty Head in the village of ‘Sconset on the island’s sou...

Hilton Head Island, part of South Carolina’s Lowcountry region, is widely known for its twelve miles of pristine beaches and its golf courses. The Hilton Head Rear Range Lighthouse overlooks the award-winning Arthur Hills Golf Course at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort. The range light station was decommissioned in 1932. In the mid-1980s, the lighthouse was incorporated into the new golf cours...

With its long coastline and about 790 islands, Scotland has been home to a large number of lighthouses. The Northern Lighthouse Board , founded in 1786, currently operates and maintains 206 lighthouses across Scotland and the Isle of Man. Automation of lighthouses began in Scotland as early as 1894, when the Oxcars Light in the River Forth had its two lightkeepers withdrawn. Fair Isle South was th...

The U.S. Lighthouse Service constructed the Staten Island Lighthouse Depot on the former site of the New York Marine Hospital. The depot, which began operation in 1864, was the key manufacturing, storage, supply, and maintenance center for the Lighthouse Service’s Third District. Activity at the depot included experimentation on lamps, illuminants, and Fresnel lenses. Under the Coast Guard in the...

Split Rock Lighthouse , one of the most picturesque lighthouses in the United States, is located on a 127-foot-high cliff on the northwest shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. By the late 1960s, the Coast Guard deemed the lighthouse obsolete and it was discontinued as an official aid. Split Rock Light Station, USLHS archives Today the light station is the centerpiece of Split Rock Lighthouse State...

The Aleutian Islands are a chain of 14 large volcanic islands and 55 smaller islands that form a dividing line between the Bering Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. Scotch Cap Lighthouse was established at the southwest corner of Unimak Island, the largest of the Aleutians, in 1903. It was the first station established on Alaska’s outside coast. Scotch Cap in the 1940s (courtesy...

Toledo Harbor Lighthouse was established in 1904 in the western end of Lake Erie, marking the entrance to the Toledo Shipping Channel and the approach to the Port of Toledo on the Maumee River. The buff-colored brick tower has a steel framework, and the total height of the lighthouse is 85 feet. There’s also an attached one-story fog signal building. The building’s distinctive Romanesque architect...

On this date in 1789, the first Congress approved an act for the establishment of lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers. Two hundred years later, Congress passed an act that designated August 7, 1989, as National Lighthouse Day. This day is observed at many lighthouses, although Congress has not designated National Lighthouse Day in perpetuity. Boston Light Station, the first in North Amer...

Eldred Rock is at the north end of Alaska’s Lynn Canal, 55 miles north of the port of Juneau and about 35 miles south of Skagway. Eldred Rock Lighthouse was first lighted on June 1, 1906, as one of four lighthouses in the Lynn Canal. It’s the only remaining example of the wood-frame lighthouses that were built in the state between 1902 and 1906. Eldred Rock, Alaska. USLHS photo The light sta...

Aerial view of Cape Beale, BC With local maritime commerce in the area growing, the high cliffs of Cape Beale on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, were surveyed for a lighthouse in the early 1870s. A 31-foot-tall wooden tower was constructed with a powerful second-order lens in the lantern, and the station began service in 1874. The original wooden lighthouse at Cape...

More than 20 miles from the nearest port at Mount Desert Island in Maine, low-lying, wave-swept Mount Desert Rock is only about 17 feet above sea level at its highest point. Congress appropriated $5,000 for a lighthouse on Mount Desert Rock on March 2, 1829, to aid mariners heading to Frenchman and Blue Hill Bays from the south. The light went into operation on August 25, 1830. The structure weath...

This is the first of two episodes focusing on light stations that are owned by the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Great Duck Island is more than 200 acres in size and about nine miles south of the much larger Mount Desert Island. The Lighthouse Board recommended a light station on the island in 1885, and funds were appropriated in 1889. The light was established on December 31, 1890...

Pomham Rocks is a tiny island in the Providence River, about 800 feet from the east shore of the Riverside section of East Providence, Rhode Island. With increased shipping traffic heading toward Providence in the 1800s, Pomham Rocks was an obvious place to establish a navigational aid, and funds were appropriated in 1870. A wooden dwelling with a mansard roof was built on a granite foundation wit...

This is part two of a two-part interview with Ralph Krugler, historian for the Hillsboro Lighthouse Preservation Society. Ralph is not only one of the most knowledgeable people about Florida lighthouses, but he also has been helping with the ongoing creation of the J. Candace Clifford Lighthouse Research Catalog for the U.S. Lighthouse Society. Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse; USLHS photo Hillsboro Inl...

Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse is about halfway between Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton on the southeast coast of Florida, marking the northern limit of the Florida Reef, the third largest coral barrier reef system in the world. The skeletal lighthouse was constructed in 1907, with a second-order Fresnel lens. 1946 postcard of Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse. U.S. Lighthouse Society archives. The Fresnel le...

The lighthouse on Maine’s Seguin Island was approved by President George Washington in May 1793. The tower had to be rebuilt in 1819, and then again in 1857. Also in 1857, a new nine-foot-tall first-order Fresnel lens was installed, and that lens remains in operation today. Over a period of 31 years, the station was foggy 15 percent of the time. A 10-inch steam fog whistle was installed by 1...

Kinnaird Head Lighthouse is in Fraserburgh, a town in Aberdeenshire in northeastern Scotland. The original navigational light at Kinnaird Head was a simple lantern placed in a tower of a sixteenth century castle in 1787, installed by Thomas Smith of Edinburgh. The engineer Robert Stevenson—Thomas Smith’s son-in-law and the grandfather of the famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson—improved the lighth...

This is the first of two episodes dealing with Scottish topics. Episode 66 will be posted on Wednesday, June 18, and will feature the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses. The North Carr Lightship is the last remaining light vessel in Scotland. The first light vessel stationed near the North Carr rocks on the SE coast went on station in 1887. Only two years later it was replaced by a more substantial ve...

Point Betsie Light Station is on the northeast side of Lake Michigan, north of the city of Frankfort. The lighthouse, built of cream city brick from Milwaukee, began service in 1858. The station was greatly enlarged in 1894 to about triple its original size. Point Betsie and Sherwood Point became the last light stations on Lake Michigan to be fully automated and de-staffed in 1983. In 2004, owners...

The Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse ( Wikimedia Commons photo by Grim23 ) James Dougass (U.S. Lighthouse Society) In an area of London known as the Docklands, where the River Lea meets the River Thames, is a part of the waterfront known as the Trinity Buoy Wharf. And on the wharf is London’s only lighthouse. The lighthouse at the Trinity Buoy Wharf was never used for navigation. The wharf itself was...