[250 years ago this week, Rhode Island banned the slave trade. That significant moment was just one of many in this littlest state’s story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Ocean State histories, leading up to a special post on works through which you can learn more about Rhode Island!]
Three telling
moments in the history
of the third oldest American lighthouse.
1)
Revolutionary shifts: After years of petitions
and plans, a lighthouse was finally built on Beavertail
Point, at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, in 1749. Less than thirty years
later, in December 1776, the British
occupied nearby Newport, controlling the city and its region and waterways
for nearly three years. When the Continental Army forced the British to retreat
in October 1779, they burned the lighthouse nearly to the ground on their way
out and took the light with them. In the years after the Revolution the light
was rebuilt and –assembled, but this wasn’t the only Revolutionary change, as
the 1789
Congressional Lighthouse Act took over federal control of all the nation’s
lighthouses and made Newport’s
customs collector (and a Signer of the Declaration of Independence), William
Ellery, Beavertail’s first superintendent. Each of these shifts reflects
how much the Revolution and its military and political aftermaths affected
every place and part of the American landscape.
2)
Industrialization’s influences: An 1851
report described the original wooden lighthouse as the “worst built tower
yet seen,” and by 1856 a new, granite lighthouse with all new illuminating
equipment and a fog signal (utilizing compressed air, invented by Connecticut’s Celabon
Leeds Daboll, and known as the Daboll trumpet), had been completed (and
remains in operation to this day). That process and its details alone suggests
the impact of industrialization and its effects on American society and
culture. Yet the next few years saw even more innovations, including the 1857
installation of the nation’s first steam whistle and in 1866 another new fog signal,
this one based on a hot air process developed by Swedish American engineer and
inventor John Ericsson
(designer of the famous Civil War ironclad the Monitor). It’s easy to think of lighthouses as relatively
unchanging parts of a nation’s landscape, but Beavertail reflects just how much
invention and industrialization impacted the light and helped revolutionize the
society around it at the same time.
3)
The Hurricane of 1938: It certainly
has competition, but by most accounts the Great New England Hurricane
of 1938 remains the worst storm ever recorded in New England. While
lighthouses are of course intended to aid in such conditions, it’s also fair to
say that they—and their keepers and inhabitants—are among the most vulnerable
and threatened spots in any storm. Carl
Chellis, who had been Beavertail keeper for less than a year when the
hurricane hit in late September, survived the storm, but his young daughter
died when her school bus was thrown by the wind; assistant keeper Edward
Donahue leapt into the water to survive a collapsing engine room and was
rescued when his son dove in after him. Further out in Narragansett Bay the
storm produced an even more tragic result, as Whale
Rock Lighthouse was entirely destroyed and its assistant keeper Walter
Eberle (a Navy veteran determined to keep the lighthouse working during the
storm) killed. I’d like to think that with today’s technologies such tragedies
could be averted, and of course lighthouses
are now automated rather than kept by hand; but hurricanes, whether in
these Beavertail histories or in our own era, remain primal reminders of those
things no human advances can control.
Next Rhode
Island history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Ocean State stories you’d highlight?
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