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Old lighthouse keeper painting2/14/2024 ![]() ![]() Keeper Gammage asked to be paid for the outbuildings, but received only a little money from Mears. Four years later, a political appointment saw Jeremiah Mears replace Gammage. took over after Dunham in 1837, Dunham requested and received $1,100 from Gammage for outbuildings he had built at the station. Station before addition of fog bell building Although Congress ordered the Treasury to adopt Dunham’s invention in 1837, it is not known to what extent it was used. Keeper Dunham patented a system for keeping lamp oil from congealing in winter. ![]() When Keeper Dunham’s father, Captain Cornelius Dunham, passed away while at the station in July 1835, he was buried in a small cemetery near the lighthouse. Keeper Isaac Dunham, his wife, and five children were joined in February 1831 by a baby boy, whom they named Benjamin Franklin Dunham. Also the Lamps reflectors and apparatus is according to Contract.” Keeper Dunham oversaw the job and certified that “a Better Tower and Lantern never was Built in this State. The original interior stairway was of “good sound hard pine,” and an octagonal, domed iron lantern capped the tower. This second tower, the one that survives today, measures thirty feet to the lantern deck, and is sixteen feet in diameter at the base and ten feet in diameter at the top. The need for the accompanying lighting apparatus was advertised in March 1835, and Winslow Lewis was awarded a contract to supply eight oil lamps and fourteen-inch reflectors. To avoid past mistakes, the contract specified that the mortar was “never to have been wet with salt water” and that tower was to “be built solid with Stone and Mortar, in a single wall…and not to be done by building two walls and filling in.” Joseph Berry of Georgetown, nephew of the original builder, received the contract for the conical granite tower. Dunham had served as a privateer in the War of 1812, then moved to Maine and turned to farming before becoming a lighthouse keeper at $350 per year.Ī scant eight years after Pemaquid Lighthouse was built, a replacement tower was required. Jeremiah Berry of Thomaston built the structures, which ended up costing $3,503, and Pemaquid’s fixed white light went into service on November 29, 1827.Īlthough Stephen Pleasonton, the Treasury auditor in charge of lighthouses, recommended Esais Preble to be Pemaquid Point’s first keeper, the honor went to forty-year-old Isaac Dunham of Bath, Maine. The light station’s plot was purchased for ninety dollars from Samuel and Sarah Martin, descendants of survivors of the Angel Gabriel shipwreck. The partially unloaded bark went down in an August 1635 hurricane taking four or five persons and all the passengers’ belongings.Īfter the region had been settled for over two centuries, an act dated finally provided $4,000 for the construction of a rubblestone lighthouse and a twenty by thirty-four-foot keeper’s house, with an attached ten by twelve-foot kitchen at Pemaquid Point. The area’s most famous shipwreck was the 240-ton Angel Gabriel, a British passenger galleon carrying about 100 English settlers and much needed provisions. Still, it was a bit surprising for Gosnold when Native Americans boarded the Dartsmouth in western garb and greeted him in English. When Bartholomew Gosnold sailed to Pemaquid in 1602, the area was already a port of call for fishermen of various nationalities and the occasional coastal trader. This picturesque lighthouse has attracted many, including Edward Hopper who captured its image in his 1929 watercolor, “Pemaquid Light.” Today, Pemaquid Point, with its colorful rocky shoreline, is one of New England’s most-visited and photographed lighthouses, drawing over 100,000 visitors annually.Įarly view before dwelling was painted white around 1875 currency ever to bear the image of a lighthouse – Maine’s official quarter featuring Pemaquid Point Lighthouse. Pemaquid Point Lighthouse is the only place in the United States where you can tour Maine’s first land-based lighthouse opened to the public, get married, spend your honeymoon, and pay for it all using the first U.S.
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