#lighthouse history

[ltwilliammowett]

Lighthouse Keeper chest ?, 19th century

Painted with view of Gurnet Twin Lighthouses. Plymouth Light Station, also known as Gurnet Light, was first established on a high bluff at the end of Gurnet Point in 1768. Plymouth served as one of the major ports of colonial America. Increased shipping traffic necessitated a navigational aid to guide mariners in and out of Plymouth Harbor and further promote trade. The original structure resembled a house with a lantern room at each end of the roof. After a fire destroyed the first light station in 1801, a new pair of wooden towers was constructed by 1803.

In 1842 the crumbling towers were replaced with two white octagonal pyramidal towers. The north light was 110 feet above sea level, and the south tower 102 feet. However, the lights were too close together and often were seen as a merged single beam of light. 1871 a fourth-order fresnel lens was installed, greatly increasing the strength of the lights. And in 1914 the Cape Cod Canal opened, giving new importance to the Gurnet as a navigational aid. The Bureau of Lighthouses discontinued one of the twin lights in 1924 as it phased out multiple lights. The remaining light still stands.

On March 8, 1977, the Plymouth Light Station was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1998 the Coast Guard moved the lighthouse back from the eroding 45-foot cliff. It was standing only 50 feet from the edge when it was placed on rollers and moved by tracks 140 feet from its previous site. It now sits on the property of Fort Andrew at Gurnet Point. And in 1999 the Coast Guard gave Project Gurnet & Bug Lights, Inc. the first of many 5-year licenses allowing us to restore, preserve, and maintain Gurnet Light.

[saraichinwag]

Why Are Lighthouses Important?

[honourablejester]

Oh, I didn’t know that.

I was listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on youtube, and browsing the comments several people mentioned …

Okay. The song is about the real sinking of the freighter the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in 1975. And there’s a line in the song:

“In the Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral,

The Church Bell chimed till it rang twenty nine times,

For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald”

Which references something that the actual Maritime Church in Detroit did in honour of the ship’s crew. And I just found out in those youtube comments for his song that when Gordon Lightfoot died in May last year (2023), the Maritime Church rang those bells again, this time 30 times. Once for every man on the Edmund Fitzgerald, and once more for Gordon Lightfoot.

That’s … That is a memorial I would be proud to have earned. And proud to give. I do like that. A lot.

Apparently, the Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior also lit its beacon in honour of him.

Sorry. I’m having … extremely maritime sort of feelings over here. Songs and memorials, bells and beacons, and the ways we carry memory forward. That’s … that’s a good memorial. I like that.

[wrathofachilleus]

[nedlittle]

so i work for a small regional museum. remotely, i should add. the museum itself is about 2000km west, so i've never actually been there but i research and write articles about local history for them. and because the town was only formally settled in the 1920s and a lot of the museum's supporters are older, the majority of the history i write about is within, or just outside of living memory. this means that people will comment on our posts with memories or connections of their own. they'll tag their friends and family and say 'remember this?'

a few week ago, i wrote a week's worth of posts about immigration, largely displaced persons in the aftermath of the second world war. there was an outpouring of memories and people tagging their family members and sharing them. our notifications were blowing up with people saying "thanks for writing about my uncle" and "i knew them when i was young, but i never knew their story" and "she looks so beautiful here" and "our families used to get together for dinners, i'm still friends with his daughter."

regular people, non-historians, are inclined to think of history as a monolithic past leading up to the present; an easy timeline of textbook names and events. and we think of museums largely the same way. you have the louvre and you have the smithsonian and maybe a modern art museum or a niche museum for skeletons or canoes or one specific guy. museums are reserved for the big things, but they're also for the little things and people that will never be in textbooks.

and i'm thinking about the way people responded to those posts, seeing their own history remembered with the same reverence as the big stuff. maybe you never knew the people being written about, or maybe you did, and for a few days, they are alive again, and your neighbours and your classmates and your councilmen are remembering your family, and they are alive.

[clove-pinks]

A few Fresnel lenses from my visit to the National Museum of the Great Lakes! This one is a fourth-order lens from the lighthouse on Ojibwa Island, Lake Michigan, made in 1891.

A cute little fifth-order lens, which was used in Sandusky Harbor, Ohio, in 1891.

No first-order Fresnel lenses were used on the Great Lakes, and only five second-order lenses were placed. One of them was in the Spectacle Reef Lighthouse on Lake Huron in 1873, now in the museum:

My photography doesn't give a true sense of scale; that second-order lens is huge.

There is also a model of the lightship Huron, which is now a museum ship you can visit.

[illustratus]

The Tower of Hercules, a Roman lighthouse in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain

[avvidstarion]

The characters in veilguard make Such a big deal out of Thee Elven Gods being real and evil when like. Idk I always got the vibe that the average human wouldn’t be able to name any of the elven gods except for maybe Mythal. The city elves don’t even know much about the Dalish and that’s like. By human design. The Dalish are a persecuted and oppressed religions minority and I feel like this is just another way the game glosses over “political lore”. The average reaction to the news wouldn’t be deep existential dread it would be “wtf is a ghilan’nain?”

[sometimeslondon]

A lighthouse in London

I like a bit of quirkiness. This lighthouse was built in 1864. Although located by the River Thames, it was not a navigational aid but used to experiment with and develop lighting equipment. You may have also seen it in the Netflix film, Rogue Agent.

[ksjanes]

The lighthouse in Jupiter Florida was conceived in 1851, the Jupiter Lighthouse was constructed in stages over the next eight years. The tower is constructed of brick. The lighthouse at Jupiter was first illuminated on July 10,1860. Over the years the humidity and sea air discolored the brick and it was painted red around 1910. The Light was converted to electricity in 1928.

[jadafitch]

More Maine lighthouses coming soon...ish.

[ltwilliammowett]

A light on a reef

Until the end of the 17th century one of the threats facing shipping heading to Plymouth on the southern coast of England was the isolated and treacherous Eddystone reef, 23km directly offshore. Much of the hazard is underwater, creating complex currents, and extraordinarily high seas are often kicked up when conditions are very windy. In 1620 Captain Christopher Jones, master of Mayflower described the reef: "Twenty-three rust red [...] ragged stones around which the sea constantly eddies, a great danger [...] for if any vessel makes too far to the south [...] she will be swept to her doom on these evil rocks." As trade with America increased during the 1600s a growing number of ships approaching the English Channel from the west were wrecked on the Eddystone reef.

King William III and Queen Mary were petitioned that something be done about marking the infamous hazard. Plan to erect a warning light by funding the project with a penny a ton charge on all vessels passing initially foundered. Then an enterprising character called Henry Winstanley stepped forward and took on the most adventurous marine construction job the world had ever seen. Work commenced on the mainly wooden structure in July 1696. England was again at war, and such was the importance of the project that the Admiralty provided a man-o-war for protection.

The Winstanley Lighthouse, by English School, 17th century (x)

On one day, however, HMS Terrible did not arrive and a passing French privateer seized Winstanley and carried him off to France. When Louis XIV heard of the incident he ordered his release. " France is at war with England, not humanity," said the King. Winstanley's was the first lighthouse to be built in the open sea. It was a true feat of human endeavour. Work could only be undertaken in summer and for the first two years nothing could be left on the rock or it would be swept away. There was some assistance from Terrible in transporting the building materials, but much had to be rowed out in an open four-oared boat in a journey that could take nine hours each way. Winstanley's lighthouse was swept away after less that five years, during the great storm of 1703.

John Rudyerd's wooden lighthouse of 1708, by Issac Sailmaker, c. 1708 (x)

Winstanley was in it at the time supervising some repairs- he had said that he wished to be there during " the greatest storm that ever was." The next lighthouse was built by John Rudyerd and lit in 1709. Also made largely of timber and with granite ballast, it gave good service for nearly half a century until destroyed by fire in 1755. During the blaze the lead cupola began to melt, and as the duty keeper, 94- old Henry Hall, was throwing water upwards from a bucket he accidentally swallowed 200g of the molten metal. No one believed his incredible tale, but when he died 12 days later doctors found a lump of lead in his stomach.

Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse, by John Lynn (active 1826-1869) (x)

John Smeaton, Britian's first great civil engineer, was the next to rise to the challenge of Eddystone. He took the English oak as his design inspiration - a broad base narrowing in a gentle curve. The 22m high lighthouse was built using solid discs of stone dovetailed together. Work began in 1756, and from start to finish the work took three years, nine weeks and three days. Small boats transported nearly 1000 tons of granite and Portland stone along with all the equipment and men.

  Sir James N. Douglass's Eddystone Lighthouse, Plymouth, England, photochrome print, c. 1890–1900. The remnants of John Smeaton's lighthouse are at left. (x)

The Smeaton lighthouse stood for over 100 years. In the end it was not the lighthouse that failed; rather that the sea was found to have eaten away the rock beneath the structure. In 1882 it was dismantled and brought back to Plymouth, where it was re-erected stone on the Hoe as a memorial, and where it still stands.

The Eddystone lighthouse today (x)

It had already been replaced by a new lighthouse, twice as tall and four and a half times as large, designed by James Douglas, which now gives mariners a beacon of light visible for 22 nautical miles (40,78km).

[saraichinwag]

Do People Live in Lighthouses?

[thedeadthree]

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[wrathofachilleus]

a moment in the enchanted forest.

[existentialblake]

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the universe.