Portland Head also serves as the picturesque finish for a road race: the annual Beach to Beacon (August 1 this year), founded by Olympian and local resident Joan Benoit Samuelson. Maine’s Cape Elizabeth and Portland Head lights were immortalized by the artist Edward Hopper, and Ten Pound Island Light, off Cape Ann, by both Fitz Henry Lane and Winslow Homer.įor me, though, the region’s quintessential lighthouse is Cape Cod’s Nobska Point Light–especially when thousands of runners sweep past it during summer’s annual Falmouth Road Race (August 9 this year). What follows is a tour of some of the most stunning, most romantic, most unusual, even some of the most haunted beacons found anywhere in the world.Īt Gay Head Light, on the western end of Martha’s Vineyard, visitors are allowed into the red-brick lantern tower, where they can watch the two lights rotate–and take in extraordinary sunsets over the Aquinnah Cliffs and surf below. When it came time to take an author photo for the book’s jacket, however, I chose the humblest of backdrops: I walked to the end of our road in Maine and posed beside our lighthouse. A daily journalist who only halfheartedly accepted an assignment from a publisher to write a book about the lights, I quickly found myself sucked in by stories vastly more dramatic than the ones I was covering in my day-to-day job: stories of terror and tragedy and hardship, heroism and mystery and death. I confess that I, like marketers and souvenir-shop owners, have profited from the allure of the New England lighthouse. Which, of course, is what it’s there for. She said it was like knowing that someone’s always waiting up for you, no matter when you come home. Once, while we were walking down the long road to our stubby little lighthouse, my sister and I pondered what made it so special to us. It’s square and squat and has long been automated, augmented by an ugly modern beacon on a concrete pylon just offshore.īut its light still sweeps the bay, and its lonely foghorn sounds a plaintive, hypnotic wail. They were built to mark the rocky shore for ships.Īt the end of the road on the tiny burr of the prickly Maine coast where my relatives live is a lighthouse. They weren’t built to be the stuff of tourist brochures, postcards, and collectibles. In 1794, Knox’s yearly salary as keeper was set by the federal government at $266.67, which was raised to $333.33 in 1796.We romanticize them, but what makes New England lighthouses quintessential icons is their simple, sturdy practicality. The cannon, cast in 1700 and possibly relocated from Long Island in the inner harbor, served on Little Brewster Island for 132 years. Passing ships would fire their cannons when passing nearby in times of fog, and the keeper would reply with a blast from the light station. Franklin later wrote in his autobiography that the poem was “wretched stuff,” although it “sold prodigiously.” A cannon, America’s first fog signal, was placed on the island in 1719. The young Franklin wrote a poem called The Lighthouse Tragedy and hawked copies on the streets of Boston.
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