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They represent a special part of our history and the special breed of people who have seen to them for hundreds of years, and to the romantic they have a certain magnetism about them. Yet the lighthouses dotting the northeastern coast of the United States and Canada, as well as their keepers are rapidly fading into the past. Lighthouse keepers, and their posts are becoming more and more unnecessary as technology advances, taking over where human loyalty, strength, and endurance once were.
The first lighthouse in North America was the Boston Lighthouse on Little Brewster Island in the Boston Harbor, first lit in 1716. (The Boston Lighthouse was later destroyed during the Revolutionary War.) However, long before the Boston lighthouse they were being used in other places around the world, mainly in European countries. Even before the European lighthouses the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians were using lighthouses to help them navigate dangerous coastlines. In fact, the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, is actually an ancient lighthouse.
Even though lighthouses have had a long history, lighthouses became the most widely used during the 1900s with about 1500 in use in the United States alone. These lighthouses were cared for by the Federal Lighthouse Service, established in 1789. The lighthouse service was responsible for the appointment of keepers, the payment of keepers, and making sure that all of the keepers had enough shore time.
Ships use lighthouses to tell them where they are and to warn of a dangerous coast. This is done by using a lens that has prisms in varying colors and sizes. The lens is then rotated around the light to change intensity, length, and color of the light. The pattern created is unique to each lighthouse, and is called the characteristic.
A lighthouse also has a day characteristic. The day characteristic consists of the pattern and colors of the checks and/or stripes that adorn its walls. Also, identification in low visibility, either night or day, is achieved by sounding a bell or whistle on the hour.
During the nineteen thirties increasing technology made it easy for all of this to be automated, thus making lighthouse keepers obsolete. By 1939 the Federal Lighthouse Service came to an end, beginning the slow decline that lighthouses would experience throughout the nineteen forties continuing up to the present day.
In the 1900s there were 1500 lighthouses operating in the United States alone. Now, one hundred less (1400) are used world wide, only 340 of those are in the United States. Most of those in use are automated.
Lighthouses are well on their way to being obsolete, and lighthouse keepers all ready are obsolete, but should they be? A lighthouse keeper had the task of making sure the light was always working, the lighthouse and grounds were in excellent condition, and during low visibility to fire a cannon, ring a bell, or sound a whistle. All of this is now easily automated, or done by part-time grounds keepers hired by the Coast Guard. However, keepers did a lot more than that, including the rescue of shipwrecked craft, sheltering and caring for shipwreck victims, and using their own boats for rescues.
Keepers did all this and more, with a great loyalty to their post. Many factual events surrounding lighthouse keepers sound too fantastic to be true. One such event is one family tending one lighthouse for 180 years. Even most of the fiction stories, popular during the Victorian era, are based in truth. These stories are often about being stranded during storms, keepers and their families staying awake all night rotating the lens by hand, and most popular of all, stories of young children with a strong inbred sense of duty which compels them to keep the light going even when befallen with the worst of tragedies.
Now, people who were once heroes are quickly approaching extinction. Keepers are being forced away from their posts, but for the most part they do not go willingly.
Ingram Wolfe, a lighthouse keeper in Nova Scotia who finished on September 28, 1991, finds an excuse to return to Moshers Island, the site of his post and home for twenty-five years as often as he can. Wolfe, now 55, had been a lighthouse keeper since he was 16. Cost-cutting measures by the Canadian Government forced him to retreat to the main land of Nova Scotia and become a part-time fisherman, but he admits, "we (he and his wife) never really wanted to leave."
Even as their trade becomes extinct most keepers maintain that it is impossible to replace them with machines, and that some of their tasks simply require a human to perform them. They are most probably right too, but the future looks increasingly bleak for lighthouses and their keepers. They will have to be content with memories of a time when the proud, faithful guardians of the mariner were something more than mere machines and electronics.
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