Earlier this month, we revealed that the Northern Lighthouse Board was selling off three lighthouses near Stonehaven, Lossiemouth and Thurso, with price tags ranging from £75,000 to £270,000 – along with a foghorn at Girdleness, in Aberdeen. All the buildings, once a beacon for sailors and fishermen, would be ideal for those willing to spend some time and money creating an unusual home.
Rua Reidh Lighthouse, on the other hand, is ready to move in to. The keepers’ accommodation, at the foot of the tower, has been run as a successful home and holiday accommodation for years.
This B-listed home sits in a stunning location, on the cliff edge at Melvaig, around 12 miles from Gairloch on the west coast – officially named as the happiest place in the UK last week – and overlooking the Isle of Skye to the south-west, Harris to the west and Lewis to the north. It is for sale at offers over £325,000. Building of the lighthouse was started by David Stevenson, one of the famous family of lighthouse engineers, in 1910. Two years later, it was helping steer boats safely through the seas. Continue reading Reprint – Finders Keepers→
Elaine Graham remains the only resident among the historical buildings at Point Atkinson Lighthouse. Photograph by: NEWS photo, Lisa King
ELAINE Graham was raised in the slums of London, far from the multi-hued green of nature.
“There was nothing on my street when I was growing up,” she recalls. “I had lots of play-friends, loads of kids to play with, but there wasn’t even a geranium on a windowsill.”
Many years later, Graham is now surrounded by 75 hectares of the largest first-growth stand of coastal-elevation trees in the Lower Mainland. Her home is nestled among the remaining structures at the base of Point Atkinson Lighthouse, which stands on a craggy promontory at the edge of Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver.
She has spent half her life here, and is eager to tell the story of her neck of the woods.
Graham moved to the Point Atkinson Lighthouse station with her husband Donald and two young sons in 1980. Donald became the last of the lighthouse keepers at the site (along with senior keeper Gerry Watson) when the lighthouse was automated in 1996.
Do you want to save a lighthouse? Do you like lighthouse Christmas ornaments? This article might appeal to you. It appeals to me because it is another way to raise money to save a lighthouse. If you look on this website, there are many more ideas too.
Reprinted with permission from Tim Croft of The Star
First published July 26, 2012 11:58 AM
Lighthouse ornament
The St. Joseph Historical Society (Port St. Joe, Florida) is encouraging folks to put a touch of lighthouse under the Christmas tree this year.
As part of a fund-raising effort in its quest to save the Cape San Blas Lighthouse from the wrath of Mother Nature, the Historical Society is selling a gorgeous brass-and-silver colored replica of the lighthouse in the form of a Christmas ornament.
Cape Blas lighthouse
Each ornament costs the Historical Society $10 – Cape San Blas Lighthouse is emblazoned across the top-front of the ornament, St Joseph Historical Society on the lower back – to produce.
Isn’t this a pretty neat photo? But what is it you ask?
If you run Google Chrome as a web browser1 you could use the Search by Image extension to find other copies of the photo and then the website, and then what is shown in the photo. Here I have just presented a photo with no information (caption).
The Royal Canadian Mint is paying tribute to the thousands of courageous men and women who have served, and who continue to serve Canada both at sea and on shore, by issuing a 99.99 per cent fine silver coin featuring our flagship icebreaker CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent hard at work in the frozen waters of the Canadian Arctic.Here we see the launch event of the silver coin in Sarnia, Ontario Facebook page.
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The Royal Canadian Mint have launched their newest coin, which pays tribute to the Coast Guard on the 50th anniversary of its formation. The commemorative coin honors all former and current members of the Canadian Coast Guard for their commitment to keeping Canadian waterways safe, often while risking their own lives to do so.
Canada, the world’s second largest country in land mass – has the world’s largest coast line at more than 125,570 miles or 202,080-kilometres. The Canadian Coast Guard was founded on the 26th January 1962 and is a special operating agency within the department of Fisheries and oceans. Today’s Coast Guard employs more than 4,500 personnel with 114 vessels and 22 helicopters under its command. Coin Update Continue reading $20 Fine Silver Coin – 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Coast Guard – Mintage: 7500 (2012)→
What is a Widow’s Walk? It is definitely not a new dance!
I will give you a hint – It is a fixture built onto a house. It was prevalent in the days of sailing ships, both in Italy where it originated as a style of architecture, and also in eastern American houses on the waterfront.
Here’s a legendary quote on the use of the Widow’s Walk:
The widow's walk is the fenced in balcony on the top right
The faithful and dedicated wife, performing her daily circumambulations on the cold and lonely widow’s walk: The next sail to top the horizon may well carry her husband, gone to sea these many years. But not today. The sun sets, bringing to a close her lonely vigil for this day. Perhaps, though, the much-anticipated vision will appear tomorrow and if not tomorrow, the next day. – Fishermen’s Voice
That article gives more credit to the use of the widow’s walk for fire prevention rather than for lonely widows pining for their husbands. Below in the gallery are some photos of what a Widow’s Walk looks like.
It is not necessarily a lighthouse thing, but maybe, just maybe, a lonely lighthouse widow did walk around the lantern searching for the return of her man from town with the mail and groceries in his rowboat, or late from a fishing or hunting trip. On this website there are many stories of death on the water with a lighthouse background.
By the way, The walkway around the outside of a lighthouse lantern room (for cleaning the lantern glass) is called a Gallery, and the walkway around the light inside (for lens cleaning) is called the Lantern Gallery.
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Lighthouse Watch – House Rental, North Carolina, USA. c/w widow’s walk!
Caswell Beach house rental, North Carolina, USA. Interested? Contact
1 Widow’s Walk – A widow’s walk also known as a “widow’s watch” (or roofwalk) is a railed rooftop platform often with a small enclosed cupola frequently found on 19th century North American houses. A popular romantic myth holds that the platform was used to observe vessels at sea. The name is said to come from the wives of mariners, who would watch for their spouses’ return, often in vain as the ocean took the lives of the mariners, leaving the women widows.[1] In other coastal communities, the platforms were called Captain’s Walk, as they topped the homes of the more successful captains and supposedly ship owners and captains would use them to search the horizon for ships due in port.
However, there is little or no evidence that widow’s walks were intended or regularly used to observe shipping. Widow’s walks are in fact a standard decorative feature of Italianate architecture, which was very popular during the height of the Age of Sail in many North American coastal communities. The widow’s walk is a variation of the Italianate cupola.[2] The Italianate cupola, also known as a “belvedere”, was an important ornate finish to this style, although it was often high maintenance and prone to leaks.[3]
Beyond their use as viewing platforms, they are frequently built around the chimney of the residence, thus creating access to the structure. This allows the residents of the home to pour sand down burning chimneys in the event of a chimney fire in the hope of preventing the house from burning down
The title is a tiny bit misleading. The government is not contracting to paint the lighthouse (is not doing the job themselves using government personnel as in the olden days) but is contracting out to private persons to do the work previously done by government workers.
An interesting article on the Peggys1 Cove lighthouse in Nova Scotia says:
However, dealing with the problem is not as straightforward as sending someone the tab. Peggys Cove is owned by the federal government, which is currently getting out of the lighthouse business. The Nova Scotia government is in negotiations to take over the site, but no date has been set for completion of the talks.
So who is going to paint Peggys Cove, and many other abandoned lighthouses?
One of the commenter’s on the above site made the following reply:
Here’s the link for all those interested in bidding. Go create an account on Merx and bid away your $400.00 to paint it.
Now that Merx site is very interesting. It shows Canadian Public Tenders for jobs the Canadian Government puts out for bids. I searched but could not finds anything lighthouse-related, but maybe you will have better luck. Let me know if you find anything.
There are some interesting jobs available, but one thing comes to mind. What has happened to the Public Works Department of the Canadian Government? They used to do all the painting and construction projects..Does Public Works no longer exist?
Aha! I found it! It is now called Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC). They pay me my pension, but do they do anything else? Check out PWGSC website and see if you can find out.
Not much there about painting old lighthouses. Lots on procurement and disposal though. So I guess they just buy stuff and dispose of it when no longer needed. Is any reader working for PWGSC that can better fill us in on the workings of PWGSC?
So, unless the community is going to do the work and pay for the job itself, I guess Canadian lighthouse are headed for a dim future (pun intended).
FOOTNOTE: 1Peggys Cove (2009 population: approx. 46), also known as Peggy’s Cove from 1961 to 1976, is a small rural community located on the eastern shore of St. Margarets Bay in Nova Scotia’s Halifax Regional Municipality.- Wikipedia
This post is very interesting. It comes from a lady, Kathleen Ernst, who with her husband performs docent duty1 on an automated lighthouse in the United States. She has also written a historically-accurate non-fiction crime novel about the same lighthouse. I asked her permission to reprint the article 2 in full for you, which was given freely, so it is reprinted below for your enjoyment. What a retirement job!.
My husband Scott and I are recently back from our 4th stint as docents at Pottawatomie Lighthouse in Rock Island State Park, WI.
Rock Island is situated off the northern tip of Door County in Lake Michigan, and Pottawatomie is the state’s oldest light station. The current lighthouse, built in 1858, was magnificently restored by the Friends of Rock Island in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. It sits on top of a bluff on the northern end of Rock Island, over a mile from the boat landing and campground. There are no roads on the island, and it takes two ferry rides to get there. As docents, we give tours to guests from 10 AM to 4 PM each day. Since Scott and I both love history, and telling stories, it’s a great gig. We’re also responsible for housekeeping chores.
Otherwise, we get to live at the lighthouse. How cool is that?
There’s no electricity or indoor plumbing. (That’s Scott filling an Igloo at the old pump, in the rain.) But we have a fridge and stove powered by bottled gas, and we get to sleep in the keepers’ bedroom.
We have lots of quiet evenings. Lots of time for an impressionable writer to ponder stories of long-gone keepers, and to imagine the lighthouse as it once was.
So it was pretty much inevitable that I would write a book about the lighthouse.
In The Light Keeper’s Legacy (coming in October [2012]), my protagonist Chloe Ellefson is invited to serve as a guest curator at Pottawatomie Lighthouse. She’s excited about the job and eager for some solitude in such a beautiful, remote place. Needless to say, since this is a murder mystery, her time on Rock Island isn’t quite as peaceful as she’d hoped. Writing the book let me explore some new personal issues for Chloe, who is struggling to figure out what she wants from life. And it let me write an homage to the strong individuals who lived on Rock Island in the 19th century. The Light Keeper referenced in the title is Emily Betts, a real and totally awesome woman who served as Assistant Keeper at Pottawatomie. (In the National Archives photo below, that’s Emily barely visible in the doorway.)
The book also showcases the complexities of managing natural resources over the years. And it let me share a very special place with readers—some of whom will, I hope, decide to visit Rock Island and support ongoing restoration projects.
1 docent: A person who acts as a guide, typically on a voluntary basis, in a museum, art gallery, or zoo.
2 The article was originally displayed on the Ink Spot blog which describes itself as a corps of crime fiction authors, so if you like crime fiction then check out their webpages.
In the Lighthouses of British Columbia guestbook I came across an entry by an “M. W. Harding”. He stated that his grandfather had been the first lighthouse keeper on Lawyer Island, near Prince Rupert, BC, and had accidentally drowned. I contacted Mr. Harding and got more information from him about his grandfather’s death. – retlkpr
In the words of – Ned Harding (Grandson of Thomas Harvey who was Senior Keeper at Lawyer Island 1921 – c.1905)
Lawyer Island c. 1900s - photo CCG, Prince Rupert.
He said: “I have some information regarding the Lawyer Island Lighthouse. This information was given to me by my mother who was the daughter of the original keeper. The keeper’s name was Thomas Harvey who took care of the light starting approximately 1901. He was married to my grandmother in 1898 and my mother was born in Vancouver in 1899.”
“My mother and grandmother were also at Lawyer Island from about 1902. The grandmother’s name was Hannah G. Harvey, and my mother’s original name was Frances T. Harvey. The light was tended by this duo until 1904 when my grandfather was lost in the sea while rowing to Prince Rupert as was his practice from time to time.” Continue reading Drowning at Lawyer Island c. 1904→
This is a real edible cake from Sweet Treats by Jen - http://sweetsbyjen.blogspot.com/
One year ago today I signed up with HostPapa, a Canadian website service provider, after having purchased my domain name, and learned how to use WordPress, lighthousememories.ca became known on the Internet. So today is the 1st anniversary of the website know as Lighthouse Memories.
Before that time, the site had been running for seven years as a self-hosted site on my son’s server in Canada. It was moderately successful, and I had many contacts, but with the help of HostPapa and Google things have boomed and we have the website as it is today.
Over the past year I have transferred over all the files from my old website, and reposted them on the new site. As well I have tried to keep up on things that lighthouse keepers feel responsible for – pollution, weather, oil spills, wildlife and fish protection, as well as manning the light. The Canadian lightkeeper keeps his eye on everything on the sea and in the sky while performing his job.
Since January 2012, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Steven Harper has been undermining the roles of the Coast Guard on all Canadian coasts, but especially on the British Columbia coast. Firing scientists and inspectors, reducing the number of staff manning MCTS centers and planning on closing SAR and MCTS stations, not to mention declaring most of the lighthouses surplus. Not much of a birthday present.
I must say though, thanks for all the support, the nice comments and all the stories, documents and photos that have been submitted over the years.
Oh yes! Speaking of photos! Soon I will be starting photo pages for each of the BC lighthouses, and would love to see lots of submissions. I will post each station on a separate page and give credit to all who submit. Thanks.
Rua Reidh Lighthouse, on the other hand, is ready to move in to. The keepers’ accommodation, at the foot of the tower, has been run as a successful home and holiday accommodation for years.
