Lighthouses are a unique design challenge. Track down all the most likely places that a ship might crash into, from the tip of the most remote peninsula to the smallest, rockiest, most storm beaten island out to sea. Then, in each of these spots, build a tower high enough to be visible from miles away (there is actually a trigonometric they use to determine height for visibility), strong enough to withstand years of weather with minimal need for repair, and livable enough for a person to spend indefinite stretches of their life there, possibly alone, with little connection to the outside world. To come across many lighthouses is to wonder not only who lives there but also to question how it was even built to begin with. And yet, there are about 200 lighthouses in New England alone, each one a singular little expression of its small piece of the 6,000 mile coastline.
The Montauk Point Lighthouse
Just about all of the lighthouses of New England were built between the 18th and 19th Centuries, not coincidentally alongside the building of the United States. The oldest lighthouse in New England is Boston Light, a quintessential white brick tower built on a small island in Boston Harbor in 1716. The youngest (by about a century) is Rockland Harbor Southwest Light, built by a Maine dentist atop his private home in Owls Harbor in the 1980s, but nonetheless recognized by the US Coast Guard as a bonafide navigational aid.
There are the idyllic postcard lighthouses like Maine’s Nubble Light, a quaint gingerbread-style house, that’s the most photographed lighthouse in the world, as well as those with the dark and sordid histories like Maine’s Seguin Island Lighthouse, alleged to be haunted after – according to undocumented local legend – a former lighthouse keeper’s wife repeatedly played a single piano melody over and over until her husband took an axe to the piano, then killed her and himself. Almost all lighthouses in New England are now automated.
While the image of the lone lighthouse keeper, slowly going insane in a tiny room in an empty landscape, may still endure in movies and myth, the beauty of these structures is in the opposite of that. It is the light in the darkness, the most primal theme of any spirituality. It’s the idea that even in the most heavy of storms in the most remote part of the seas, there’s a structure there to provide guidance and protection, and that someone took the time to design and build it.
