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William H. C. Dodge served as a lighthouse keeper at Mt. Desert Rock Lighthouse from 1902-1909, at Seguin Island Light from 1909 to 1912, at Egg Rock Lighthouse from 1912 to 1916, at Blue Hill Bay Lighthouse from 1916 to 1920, and at Grindle Point Lighthouse from 1920 to 1934. Although he served for 32 years as a Maine lighthouse keeper, good photographs and stories of his family life in the U.S. Lighthouse Service seem to have been lost to the pages of time.
Most of what little we know came from an April, 1984 chance meeting by Maine journalist Bill Caldwell (1919-2001) with 87-year-old Kaspar Murphy at a Waldoboro, Maine nursing home. The interview was timely, as Murphy passed away a few months later on September 3, 1984.
In Caldwell’s 1986 book Lighthouses of Maine, Kaspar Murphy told Caldwell when he first went to live at Mt. Desert Rock Lighthouse, “I was six when I went to live there with my Aunt Lucy and Uncle William Dodge, who had been made the second assistant keeper there in 1902. We shared a two-family house with keeper Fred M. Robbins. The first assistant keeper and his family had a house of their own. I used to play with his boys, Arthur Newman, five, and Lawrence Newman, four.”
Most of the memories shared by Kaspar Murphy with Bill Caldwell at that time dealt with general life at the lighthouse and very little about the personal life of his uncle or aunt, or why he ended up living with them at a remote and desolate island lighthouse. However, Caldwell wrote, “Murphy was talking to me with the fluency of an educated man. But he said he only had six months of school in his life.”
Murphy explained, “My Aunt Lucy MacMullen Dodge schooled me every day on the Rock for hours. Then at later stations, too. She taught me reading, writing, grammar, and history. I learned a bit of mathematics and mechanics, from working alongside the keepers on the engines and lights and fog signals. We had to be able to repair anything.”
When William Dodge got transferred to Seguin Island, life was quite different. Unlike Mt. Desert Rock Lighthouse, where nothing could be grown, at Seguin the family had a large vegetable garden and they even grew flowers. The worst thing was the fog. Murphy recalled, “Fog at Seguin rolled in and stayed thick for weeks on end. It was especially bad when they were burning cranberry bogs on Cape Cod and the wind blew the smoke our way. The big horn blew four times a minute, day and night, weeks at a time. My bed was only inches away from it.”
In 1912, William Dodge was transferred from Seguin Island to Egg Rock Lighthouse in Frenchman Bay, and life there was as bad as it had been in Mt. Desert Rock Lighthouse. There was nothing but ledge and storms that were as savage as they had been on Mt. Desert Rock. In 1916, the family moved to the comfortable Blue Hill Bay Lighthouse where they stayed until 1921, but Caldwell did not mention any shared memories of life there; he skipped on to Grindle Point Lighthouse on Islesboro Island where Kaspar Murphy’s uncle William Dodge became the keeper in 1921. Murphy was 18 years old at that time and he said life was good there.
One memory of Murphy’s from Grindle Point Lighthouse was vivid, as he recalled, “That is the only time I ever remember a keeper deliberately putting out his light. My Uncle William did that [in] the winter when all Penobscot Bay froze over thick and solid. No shipping could move in the Bay. So Uncle William extinguished his light, got a horse and sled and drove Aunt Lucy and me across the ice from Islesboro Island to Belfast and we went shopping and ate a meal at a restaurant.”
As he ended this section of his book, Caldwell wrote, “Kaspar Murphy was tiring and his voice was weakening. He stretched out on his nursing home bed to rest. But he looked happy. Perhaps relating to personal things in his life, Kaspar Murphy said, “You can lose your health. You can lose your money. You can lose your home. But no one can take away your memories.”
This story appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2019 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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