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About 4:30 in the morning and I was sipping my first cup of morning coffee while reading some of the old Lighthouse Service Bulletins. As I read through them, I again was jolted to shame, even after all these years of researching, just how little information we have on our nation’s lighthouses in our files.
How can we possibly save and tell the story of our nation’s lighthouse history if we don’t have all the photos? Although we have been able to gather lots of photographs of keepers, there are still more to find. And, what about the other people who worked for the United States Lighthouse Service, and there were lots of them, crews of lighthouse tenders and lightships, lighthouse depot employees, builders, draftsmen, and office staff, but where are their photos?
I’m sure they’re around, but most people don’t know we are looking for them. And, as people die off, old scrapbooks and photo albums with unidentified people are thrown out. All one needs to do is visit some of the perhaps thousands of antique stores across America and find old family photo albums and pictures of unidentified people for sale. What a shame that people never thought of writing down the names with some of the photos. After all, they knew who they were. But they never thought about the future when they might be the last surviving person to save and document their family and nation’s history.
For example in the April 1912 Lighthouse Service Bulletin it states the following:
Ray L. Hankinson was promoted from superintendent to inspector relieving Commander E. H. Tillman in the 16th district
Francis J. Otter was promoted from draftsman in the twelfth lighthouse district to superintendent in that same district.
F.C. Kingsburg was promoted from aid to assistant superintendent in the third lighthouse district
Theodore Barbato was appointed aid in the Lighthouse Service and assigned to the general lighthouse depot
Walter C. Dibrell was promoted from assistant superintendent to inspector of the seventh district
Arthur J. Ela was promoted from second officer to aid in the Lighthouse Service for duty in the sixteenth lighthouse district.
There must be hundreds of photos in family albums of people like this who served in the United States Lighthouse Service.
But how do we find those photos?
How do we let people know we are looking for these photos? There are probably thousands of people out there who love lighthouses, but have never even heard of Lighthouse Digest! How do we spread the word?
In looking through the book Lighthouses of the Maine Coast and the Men Who Keep Them, by Robert Thayer Sterling, there are a number of great photos of lighthouse people such as - John W. Lyon, Machinist Foreman; Thomas Sampson, Engineer, Charles C. Brush, Superintendent and Harold L. Durgin, Junior Engineer. But, what happened to the real photographs? What about the many others who served in similar positions and jobs with the United States Lighthouse Service?
The U.S. Lighthouse Service was around until 1939, yet much of its photo history is not in one central location and even more of it is about to be lost forever, unless you help us save it.
One of our efforts for the past 10 years has been to create one master database where all lighthouse information can be stored and accessed by future generations of the general public and school children who might want to research our nation’s history. But yet, so much of our nation’s lighthouse history is scattered about that anyone wanting to research it in depth would eventually have to give up and use only what little that has been saved.
Within just a matter of years, the last surviving people who might actually know who some of the people in many photos in old family albums and who actually knew what they did for a living, will be gone. Then it will be too late.
We are slowly becoming a people that is losing its lighthouse history and its past. We seem to be a nation that is more interested in saving the tangible, the items we can touch and hold and collect. But, it is more important to save the photos of the men and women of yesterday who helped make our nation the great country that it is today.
You can make a difference; talk to people, talk about lighthouses, talk about what we are trying to do, talk to TV reporters, newspaper and magazine reporters, ask them to help spread the word. Tell them that we are trying to locate photographs and the memories of the people who worked, not as just lighthouse keepers, but in other positions of our nation’s lighthouse service. In this day and age of scanners and easy photo duplication it costs almost nothing to duplicate an old photo and send it to us. In fact most color copy machines make better copies of old photographs that will actually look better than the original.
This not an exaggeration - it is the honest truth - TIME IS RUNNING OUT.
Please help save our lighthouse history.
Tim Harrison
Lighthouse Digest, P.O. Box 250, East Machias, ME 04630.
E-Mail: Timh@LHDigest.com
This story appeared in the
March 2004 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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