1828 Edgartown Lighthouse with wooden walk to shore Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Edgartown has a large harbor facing Chappaquiddick Island to the south and east that was home to a highly profitable whaling industry in the late 1700s and early 1800s. A full quarter of all whaling ships in the United States sailed out of Martha’s Vineyard and nearby Nantucket during that period, and Edgartown was home to over a hundred whaling captains. The opulence of the era can still be viewed today in the form of the captain’s houses and churches that make up the Edgartown Village Historic District.

On May 23, 1828, Congress approved $5,500 for “building a pier and light-house on the Point of Flats, at the entrance to Edgartown Harbor.” That first lighthouse was a two-story dwelling with a side-gabled roof atop which was centered the lantern room. The structure was erected by a Mr. Bowker on wooden pilings out in the water, requiring its first keeper, Jeremiah Pease, to row a short distance to get to the tower. In 1830 a wooden walkway was built at a cost of $2,500 to connect the lighthouse to the shore.

Keeper Pease became part of a minor scandal when a local paper claimed that the lighthouse had become “a rendezvous for all kinds of dissipating.” Apparently a young man boarding with the keeper was the cause of the allegations, and Pease managed to reclaim his reputation and continued as keeper for two separate periods of thirteen and six years (1828-1841 and 1843-1849). Before the Lighthouse Board was formed in 1852, political patronage often ruled lighthouse appointments, and as a Democrat, Pease was replaced twice when the Whig Party was in power.

After a visit to the Edgartown Lighthouse in 1838, Lt. Edward W. Carpender, wrote the following, “Cape Poge light, 4 miles outside, is the guide to the harbor, so that the light on the breakwater requires to be of very little magnitude; yet I found the same number of lamps burning here as in the most exposed situations in the district. It is true only 7 of the 10 were front the sea, the other 3 being so placed as to reflect their light, to no useful purpose, towards the shore. I recommend the suppression of 6 of these lamps, and the compact arrangement of the remaining 4 to suit the approach to the breakwater. … It cannot be long before Government will have to reconstruct this breakwater and light-house, as the worms have made great havoc with them, and the sea threatens them, particularly the latter, with total destruction.”

1828 Edgartown Lighthouse atop stone pier Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

In 1840, the rotten wooden pilings supporting the lighthouse were replaced by a stone pier. The keeper’s house was drafty and leaky, and vulnerable to the sea and weather due to its exposed location. This resulted in a greater than average turnover of keepers, and some keepers refused to live in the official quarters preferring to seek lodging on the nearby shore.

The following report on that state of Edgartown Harbor was made in 1842.

Edgartown is the only safe one, accessible at low water, in the Vineyard sound; and this harbor will in a few years be so filled up as to become useless, unless some measures are taken to stop the present accumulation of shallow ground. A breakwater, of 1,200 feet in length, is required to keep sand and silt from washing into the harbor.

To preserve the harbor, a stone breakwater topped by a wooden walkway was constructed in 1847 at a cost of $4,700. A fourth-order Fresnel lens replaced the old lamps and reflectors in the lantern room in 1856. The keeper’s house and breakwater were both repaired a number of times, and a storage shed, oil house, and fog bell were all added between 1885 and 1896.

By the time Keeper Henry L. Thomas transferred to the lighthouse in 1931 after twelve years of service at Cape Poge, the dwelling was in tolerable shape. A reporter who paid a visit to the keeper and his family in 1934 included the following in a newspaper article describing the family’s living conditions. “Their lighthouse home has practically all the conveniences that go to make the modern home comfortable except for electricity. As the lighthouse is located a quarter of a mile out from shore it has never been wired for electricity, although they have a radio, running water, and a modern heating plant.”

The Great Hurricane of 1938 inflicted significant damage to the lighthouse, and upon taking control of the nation’s lighthouses in 1939, the U.S. Coast Guard quickly tore down the building, which would have required costly expenditures for repairs and modernization. The original plan was to replace the lighthouse with a steel skeleton tower, but instead a disused 1881 lighthouse from Crane’s Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts was dismantled and barged, minus its brick lining, to Edgartown. The relocated 45-foot cast-iron tower was soon in service, showing an automated flashing red light every six seconds, and remains an active aid to navigation.

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The Edgartown Lighthouse was refurbished by the Coast Guard in 1985 and leased to the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society in 1994. After his son Ricky died in a car accident in 1996 just three weeks after his sixteenth birthday, Rick Harrington approached the Historical Society about establishing a children’s memorial at the lighthouse. Matthew Stackpole, the society’s executive director, and Craig Dripps, a board member, led a successful fundraising campaign that raised $75,000 for the memorial. The deteriorated base of the lighthouse was rebuilt using 3,500 cobblestones enclosed by a polished granite border and divided into quadrants by granite spokes mirroring the beams of light produced by the lighthouse. Roughly 2,000 of the cobblestones are large enough to be inscribed with a child’s name, and a fair portion of them has already been purchased.

Following the dedication ceremony held for the memorial on July 14, 2001, Dick Sherman, whose own son is memorialized on a cobblestone, circled the tower in his Korean War-era sightseeing plane, a tradition he continued for several years afterwards at the annual “Ceremony of Remembrance” held at the Edgartown Lighthouse.

The Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society received funds from the Town of Edgartown in 2007 to install a spiral staircase and new windows in the lighthouse. The staircase allowed the lighthouse, which is now easily accessible from Edgartown, to be opened to the public for climbing for the first time.

References

1. The History of Martha's Vineyard Volume II, Dr. Charles E. Banks, 1911.
2. The Lighthouses of Massachusetts, Jeremy D'Entremont, 2007.
3. The Lighthouses of New England, Edward Rowe Snow, 2005.
4. Annual Report of the Light House Board, various years.