Stamp collecting can be a fun way to learn about many things, including lighthouses. Not only can you identify which countries have lighthouses, but you can also see what they look like. Sometimes you can find informative material about lighthouses, such as where they are located, their characteristic, the type of lighting apparatus, in addition to related subjects such as the Coast Guard, buoys, and lifesaving.
OCTOBER 12, 1992 A day of great celebration in many parts of the world. There will be parades of ships, and there will be parades of people where there is no water. In cities bearing the name "Columbus," and in cities with a large population of Italian ancestry there will be banners, costumes, music, speeches and spectacular nighttime fireworks. The plans are set for a festive Columbus Day, 1992, the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.
Certainly every citizen of Jamestown, on Rhode Island's Conanicut Island, is familiar with the Beavertail Lighthouse on the island's southern end. However, it is less certain that local citizens are familiar with Conanicut Lighthouse on the island's north end. It may be that many local people aren't aware of it at all. Yet for 48 years it served as a significant aid to navigation for shipping in Narragansett Bay.
Coney Island, now a peninsula attached to the mainland, was formerly the weseternmost of the barrier islands off New York's Long Island. The island was named for its once teeming rabbit population; coney is an old word for rabbit. A bill "to establish lights at the western end of Coney Island," known as Norton's Point (after a nineteenth-century politician who once ran a hotel at the point), was introduced in Congress in 1888. J.O. Coleman, New York City's commissioner of street cleaning, urged passage of the bill in a February 1889 letter to New York's representatives in Congress.
The history of many southern lighthouses, probably hastily researched, states that during the Civil War the lens from the tower was "buried in the sand" by the Confederates to keep it from the Yankees, or in some cases the lens was destroyed. The buried in the sand theory even followed a 1st order lens to the Pigeon Point lighthouse in California. Some articles and books on Pigeon Point state that the present lens was removed from Cape Hatteras, buried in the sand during the Civil War and then dug up and shipped to Pigeon Point.
Arriving in Ketchikan, Alaska, headquarters of the 16th Lighthouse District, in April, 1915, I assumed my new position of Superintendent, making me the district engineering officer and second ranking official. My chief, the district Lighthouse Inspector, was Captain W. C. Dibrell, formerly of the US. Coast and Geodetic Survey where he acquired the title of Captain. Our first conference indicated that the most urgent problem confronting the district was the establishment of a lighthouse and fog signal station on Cape St. Elias in the Gulf of Alaska.
Over fifty years before the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway (1959), I was building lighthouses and related engineering projects in some of the most isolated regions of the Great Lakes and along their connecting waterways.
June 24, 1900 - I opened this journal today after having used the old one for nearly fifteen years. Our two children grown from infants to a full grown young man and woman and this little house is the place that they have learned to call home, Sweet Home ! ! Be it ever so humble there is no place like home. What an uncertain world this is. Who can look into the future? And who would want to? I made the first entry in this journal on a quiet Sabbath afternoon. Who will write the closing one? echo answers, who?
Where the estuary of France's Gironde River spills into the Bay of Biscay stands a magnificent lighthouse thought by many to be the finest lighthouse ever built. Among the wonders of the venerable structure are an apartment, called the King's chamber and, on the floor above, a chapel with a domed ceiling rising two storys. Both are decorated with the richness and elegance of the Renaissance, truly quarters fit for a King of France.
One might think a lighthouse an unlikely location for a family farm. But small farms were to be found at most lighthouses built in America until the 1930's. Blue Hill Bay Light Station was one such place. This lighthouse in Maine is located, on Green Island on the west side of the bay for which it is presently named, near where an old inside passage shipping route entered Blue Hill Bay. At one time it was known as the Eggemogin Lighthouse, for it is at the eastern entrance to Eggemogin Reach, the coastal waterway that connects Penobscot Bay with Blue Hill Bay.