Wooden Elm Tree Lighthouse Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Elm Tree Lighthouse began operating in 1856, showing a fixed white light from a third-order lens, at a height of sixty-two feet above sea level. The light’s first keeper was William Hooper. Originally, the tower and the dwelling were positioned right next to each other, but in 1899, a change in the course of Swash Channel, which the range lights marked, required that the tower be moved.

Jacob Swain was seventy years old and in his fifteenth year as keeper at Elm Tree, when he married a widow named Sarah, who had two children. Over the next few years, the newlyweds had two more children of their own. In addition to taking care of the four children, Sarah often assisted her husband with the lighthouse duties. On February 14, 1906, Jacob died, leaving behind the four children and a nearly penniless wife. At the time, the children ranged in age from fourteen to three. It was a general custom when lighthouse keepers died to appoint their widow as the new keeper, and Sarah applied for her husband’s post. The position , however, was instead awarded to Edward Burge, who had been keeper at West Bank Lighthouse for about six years.

Jacob Swain had been a popular man in the local community, and a petition was raised to force the Lighthouse Service to reconsider its decision. Captain R. McKenzie, the Lighthouse Service Inspector for the area, said he understood the popular sentiment, but wrote, “As a business proposition the Light House Establishment must pay more attention to living keepers than to the relatives of dead ones.” The seemingly hard-hearted inspector added that Sarah had “married Mr. Swain some seven or eight years ago when he was about seventy years old and cannot herself be said to have any great claim on the Light House Establishment.” Edward Burge began his service as keeper at Elm Tree on April 14, 1906.

Burge was, at the time, a twenty-year veteran of the Lighthouse Service, having previously served at Navesink, Old Orchard Shoals, and West Bank. In a 1924 interview, Burge told about a pet he had out at West Bank.

Had a little dog once - fox terrier. Got him when he was a pup and I was over on Old Orchard Shoals. Took him with me out to West Bank when it was first built, and raised him out there. You couldn’t get that dog to live ashore. Sometimes when I took him with me after supplies, he’d run down to the edge of the water and look out toward the light, and whine. If the light dimmed at night, or the fog signals stopped, he’d bark and tear around.

He recognized a lot of boats, too, and would bark to the tugs he knew. I used to tie a flag to his tail, and he’d run out onto the gallery and wave signals. He always slept outside on the gallery, no matter how stormy it was, and watched the light and the boats. He was a lot of company.

When I was transferred to Elm Tree I brought him ashore with me, but he wouldn’t live here. He was homesick, so I had to take him out and give him to the new keeper on the West Bank. He lived on the offshore lights for eleven years. Then the keeper brought him ashore, and he died in three days.

“Take being a keeper of a lighthouse, for instance. It’s a sort of easy job - at least those who never kept a light say it is. There isn’t much to do most of the time. But when there is something to do, it counts. It teaches a man to rely on himself and to do things for himself. Maybe there isn’t a big, important thing to do more than once a year; but waiting three hundred and sixty-four days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes, so as to be sure to be on the job in that other minute is hard enough.

“But it isn’t a bad job; though, of course, on an offshore light one hasn’t any close neighbors. Fact is, if it weren’t for the flies I’d think it was a pretty good job... Worst place in the world for flies! They swarm by millions on lights miles off shore until the keepers pray for a gale of wind to sweep them away.

“A fellow has lots of time to think, and out there, alone on the water, with the ocean and the sky, the storms and calms, after a while a fellow quits thinking of himself as being important, or fitted to be something else. I never heard of a lighthouse keeper having the swelled head.”

In November of 1919, as World War I was winding down, Miller Airfield was built adjacent to Elm Tree Lighthouse on what had been the farm of William H. Vanderbilt. Named in honor of Captain James Ely Miller, who was shot down in Europe during the war, the airfield served first as an Air Service Coast Defense Station and later as an Army Air Field, a Coast Artillery gun site, a Nike Missile Repair Depot, and a US Army Special Forces base.

1939 concrete Elm Tree Lighthouse Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

On December 16, 1960, a TWA Lockheed Super Constellation bound for LaGuardia and a United Airlines DC-8 headed to Idlewild Airport (now JFK), collided above Miller Field. The wreckage of the TWA plane plummeted to the ground at Miller Field, while the DC-8 eventually crashed in Brooklyn. The mid-air collision was the worst airline disaster in the United States as the time. All 134 person on board the planes were killed along with six people at the crash site in Brooklyn.

In 1939, the old wooden Elm Tree Lighthouse was torn down, and the beacon was moved to a sixty-five-foot tall concrete tower. A sixth-order lens was installed, and the power was changed from incandescent oil to electric. The new tower functioned as an aviation warning beacon as well as a maritime one. The City of New York maintained this tower, which showed alternating white and green lights for aircraft. Maritime traffic could only see the lights on range. In 1964, both the Elm Tree and New Dorp range lights were discontinued and replaced with channel markers.

Miller Field was deactivated in 1969, and the land was turned over to the National Park Service in 1972. The field, which is now home to several ball fields, is part of the Staten Island Unit of Gateway National Recreation Area. The concrete Elm Tree Lighthouse and a vacant double seaplane hanger remaining standing as reminders of the events that formerly played out on the present sports fields.

References

1. Northeast Lights: Lighthouses and Lightships, Rhode Island to Cape May, New Jersey, Robert Bachand, 1989.
2. “Could You Live Alone, Like Ed Burge Did Long Ago?,” Hugh S. Fullerton, Lighthouse Digest, January 2004.