The Plymouth (Gurnet) Lighthouse and The Pilgrims' Connection

Would the Pilgrims have felt safer and more welcome to Plymouth with a lighthouse there to guide them? I think it's safe to say they and their leader, William Bradford, would have certainly appreciated a lighthouse to help guide them to shore. Instead, they landed at Plymouth Rock without a lighthouse and established the town of Plymouth in 1620. The Plymouth Lighthouse was not built until years later.

 Known to locals as "Gurnet Lighthouse," the Plymouth Lighthouse stands at the southern tip of a sandy peninsula known since the Pilgrim days as the Gurnet. (The word Gurnet derives from a fish of the same name and is plentiful along the Devonshire Coast of England.) 

Gurnet was also the site of the first "twin light" station in today's United States. John and Hannah Thomas owned the land where the Commonwealth of Massachusetts established the two lighthouses in 1768. Essentially it was a small wooden house with a lantern attached to either end of the roof. John, and later his widow, operated the station for several years, giving Hannah the distinction of being the country's first female light keeper.

Both wooden towers were destroyed by fire in 1801. They were temporarily replaced by a single beacon, while a second set of towers were built, 30-feet apart, in 1803. These towers, in turn, were superseded in 1842 with a pair of 34-foot pyramidal ones, used also as range lights to help mariners clear Browns Bank. In the 1920s, the Bureau of Lighthouses concluded its push to do away with twin-light stations. Therefore, Plymouth's northeast tower was then deactivated in 1924 and taken down. The southern light, pictured above, is the oldest wooden lighthouse in the U.S. Its fourth-order Fresnel lens flashing the light was automated in 1986 and since has operated on solar power. In December 1998, the U.S. Coast Guard relocated the lighthouse further back from the edge of the eroding sand dune.

At the time of my visit here in 2001 the lighthouse remained active. Due to the distance from my viewpoint to the location of the lighthouse, I used a 500mm lens with a 2X coupler in order to get this imperfect picture of this historical lighthouse.