“I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
And keep him company.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
And live by the side of the sea.
I’ll polish his lamp by the light of day,
So ships at night can find their way
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper,
Won’t that be okay?”
— Erika Eigen
Flashing lightning, splitting timbers, hull and bulwark rent asunder, foundering on the jagged rocks, massive combers pounding reefs and somewhere beyond, crashing against the shore. Too far for all those washed overboard, each one sinking beneath the waves, and the whole works, men, cargo and ship, scuttled to the bottom of the sea to be heard from again nevermore.
Enter lighthouses: long before depth-sounders, sonar, and GPS, their beams warned mariners away from inhospitable shores, helping prevent the high-stakes, watery-grave disasters so common along treacherous coasts.
The most famous — if not the first — recorded lighthouse in history was the Pharos of Alexandria. Approaching the Egyptian coastline near the Nile delta in 280 B.C. a voyager could not help but see the open flame set atop a structure built 450 feet high. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, an earthquake finally brought the lighthouse low.
Though it is many things—a fjord, a tidal estuary, a drowned river with a salt line somewhere near Poughkeepsie—the Hudson River does not pose the same challenges to sailors as an oceanic coastline does.
Irrespectively, a benthic mapping project conducted at the turn of the century using multi-beam sonar found the wrecks of up to 400 vessels lying on the riverbed between New York City and Troy—mostly sloops, schooners, and canal boats, with the occasional steamboat.
Before the steamboats arrived, no lighthouses had been built along the Hudson River at all.
Voyaging by water, figuring the wind, the currents, the tides and the setting sun, a trip from New York City to Albany could take the better part of a week. If a ship captain wasn’t reckless, the vessel would be tied off to a mooring or dropped anchor when the night fell.
But it was theorized that if one could just gather some men, offer them money, hand them some shovels and point them towards a boiler and a pile of coal in the belly of a boat, enough steam could be generated to turn a paddlewheel. Such a vessel under its own propulsion could then pay less attention to the winds and the currents and the tides. Even the sun. All would be made subservient to the needs of commerce.
It was the engineer and inventor Robert Fulton, who launched the United State’s first commercially successful steamboat in the Hudson River in 1807, and it was Robert Livingston, the financier, who paid for him to do it. Thus stoker jobs to feed the boilers multiplied, and trimmer jobs to move the piles of coal. And jobs for steamboat pilots.
Livingston enjoyed a brief monopoly until, in quick succession, three canals were completed, connecting the river to Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, and the coal country of Pennsylvania. Aided by buoyancy—since the weight ships could carry was virtually limitless—waterborne transportation exploded. Both goods and people became cargo, and the steam-powered shipping business proved highly lucrative. New York State rose to national prominence, leading in population, industry, and economic strength.
But while currents and tides and wind had been subdued, still there remained the matter of how to transport cargo without ending up on rocks, being mired in sandbars, up high and dry on shorelines in a fog, during storms, and all the hours of moonless nights.
So lighthouses came into vogue—and with them, lighthouse keepers, tasked with cleaning the lens, reflectors, and lantern glass, tending the lamp fire, winding the spring to keep the light turning, and, when all else failed, ringing the fog bells.
Because 90% of the inhabitants of the United States were still farmers or engaged in farm-adjacent labors, and lighthouse work was a steady paycheck, and because the President of the United States selected the lighthouse-keepers, it came with some prestige.
While bachelors had historically served as lighthouse keepers, experience had shown that family men were more desirable. The job was a lonely gig. If left alone, lighthouse keepers tended towards laziness, or turned sullen, odd or anti-social. Many turned to drink.
Rather than stag stations, the lighthouses of the Hudson River were built to resemble single-family homes, spacious enough to accommodate a multiplying lifestyle, with a glass-enclosed room with rotating lamp and lens set on top. Unlike the lighthouses of the coast, the light need not be set high enough to carry over the curvature of the earth – only down the river a-ways to ward pilots off from the pitfalls.
The Saugerties Lighthouse, built in 1835, was the first in Ulster County. Its light was produced by burning whale oil in five lamps set among highly polished metal surfaces called parabolic reflectors. Resembling too-deep, polished metallic soup bowls set up on their sides, the way they are shaped focuses reflected light into a beam. The light travels farther this way.
Three years later, Kingston also received its first lighthouse at the mouth of the Rondout. But it’s said that, due to a corrupt contractor, the first lighthouse keeper received no lamp oil, lamp, or lens for the entire first season on the water—just an unlit lighthouse in the dark.
Four miles to the south, on the edge of some mud flats called the Esopus Meadows, another lighthouse was built. Where now there are shallows, once there were meadows, built up by the silt and sediment of the Black Creek. A vessel could run aground here. Assuming no severe damage, an unlucky steamboat pilot could wait for a rising tide and hope the buoyancy would lift the vessel free.
But lighthouse keepers on the Hudson River are no more. For 123 years, these lighthouses held prominence in the community and immortality in the imagination — whether seemly or unseemly — earning the respect of river pilots, businessmen, and passengers who relied on them to stay safe and dry.
Prominence and notoriety
A brief recitation:
The last lighthouse keeper on the Hudson was Emil J. Brunner at the Athens-Hudson lighthouse. The first was Cornelius Lansing – by all accounts, a total incompetent whom the townspeople had replaced.
George Murdock, a lighthouse keeper in Kingston, failed to return to his wife and children one night after rowing to the mainland for groceries. The next morning, his body was found floating in the Rondout, the groceries he had meant to bring back still in his boat. It’s thought that George had tied one on.
Kate and Ellen Crowley – lighthouse keeper’s daughters both, raised in the Saugerties lighthouse – were newspaper-famous for a daring row boat rescue of two ship hands thrown into the drink when a vessel carrying bluestone overturned in a storm.
“We are simply two girls trying to do our duty here in this quiet place, taking care as best we can of our blind father and aged mother,” the two told a reporter from the New York Mercury, in 1878, back when Saugerties was still a bluestone town.
When winter sets in and the river freezes, after food stores have been exhausted, or just bored with no boat traffic, lighthouse-keeper children used to rowing ashore to attend school must now walk across the ice. Or they can ice skate.
Ellie-Hilden, wife of a Esopus Meadows lighthouse-keeper recalled that when Ice-skating from the lighthouse to the shore, her father had always advised her to tow a ladder behind. If the ice broke and she fell through she could pull the ladder towards her as a cross brace over the hole in the ice and climb out.
Another Esopus Meadows lighthouse keeper claimed to have been pursued by a pack of wild dogs who came down onto the ice hungry from the forests to stalk prey.
Nancy Rose, lighthouse keeper at Stony Point, is said to have kept her fog bell ringing with sledgehammer blows through a long, foggy night after the winding mechanism broke.
From whale oil to mineral spirits, to kerosene, and eventually to electricity and solenoids, lighthouses in the end needed neither flame nor keepers. Like toll booth collectors and assembly line workers, lighthouse keepers were done in by the inexorable creep of automation. Replaced by automatic lights and left uninhabited, many lighthouses fell into neglect. Most were torn down, and today, electric lights blink or shine from buoys instead.
Those that remain in Ulster County—in Kingston, Esopus, and Saugerties—can all be visited by the intrepid explorer, though none are the originals. The foundation of the original Esopus Meadows lighthouse succumbed to the river’s teeth: the expanding and contracting ice floes of winter. It was rebuilt a little farther out, this time with a wood frame, clapboard siding, a new foundation, and a Mansard roof. And then, after all that, the lighthouse was rammed by a boat. Left pitifully askew for some time, it was rebuilt yet again—affectionately nicknamed the Maid of the Meadows.
The original Rondout Lighthouse was blown to smithereens by the Army Corps of Engineers after the organization dredged the waterway’s approach and extended the jetties. Today, the new lighthouse stands at the mouth of the Rondout Creek, at the end of a jetty — a desaturated yellow brick structure.
The lighthouse in Saugerties has also been rebuilt. The original caught fire and burned down, the blaze presumably ignited from its own whale oil lanterns. Now run as a bed and breakfast, this is the one lighthouse a visitor can walk out along a lovely nature trail to get a look at. The other two require water transportation.
To take in the Esopus Meadows Lighthouse, curious visitors can hop aboard the Rip Van Winkle, a diesel-powered tour boat docked at the Kingston Marina, which cruises past the lighthouse on its sightseeing tour.
For the Rondout Lighthouse, the Hudson River Maritime Museum runs twice – daily trips on the Solaris, their solar-powered tour boat, taking willing passengers out to the lighthouse, where they can disembark and take a look inside.
All three lighthouses can be approached by kayak as well, though by the end of last summer, I found the Esopus Meadows lighthouse off limits due to aggressive wasps defending nests they had built up under the eaves. While I was retreating back into the kayak, a large eagle returned to its nest atop the lighthouse to glare.
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