"It is truly an honor and a privilege to be the only female Coast Guard lighthouse keeper in the country," she says. Hannah Thomas was America's first female lighthouse keeper, working 1776-1786 at Gurnet Point Lighthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, after replacing her husband, General John Thomas, when he was killed in the Revolutionary War.Īnd now Snowman, a professor who taught 1987-2004 in the Masters of Education program at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, carries on that tradition. In an extraordinary life that has combined becoming one of America’s rare female lighthouse keepers with a career as an academic professor, Snowman realised her childhood dream by marrying her. She’s the last of her kind every other Coast Guard light station in the country has long since reassigned its full-time keepers in the wake of automation. They usually mentored boys to carry on the lighthouse tasks, but some wives and daughters became keepers after their husbands or fathers died. Bonnie Donohue thinks the City of Boston should be held responsible for her injuries because of the way it configured the area next to the roadway outside her building. Christian Kozowyk Sally Snowman is the 70th keeper of Boston Light, a post that dates back to 1716. She is also Boston Light's historian and says it could take years to compile historical data and store it electronically.īoston Light is the only Coast Guard Lighthouse with a keeper, because the agency turned over the care of others to private owners and federal, state and local government agencies.Ĭenturies ago, Snowman says, lighthouse keepers were typically male sea captains with knowledge and experience maintaining structures and equipment in marine environments. In 1794, Knox’s yearly salary as keeper was set by the federal government at $266.67, which was raised to $333.33 in 1796.Now, because of the pandemic, she works at her home or a mainland Coast Guard base, and the Coast Guard provides scheduled visits to the island to identify any safety or maintenance issues. The cannon, cast in 1700 and possibly relocated from Long Island in the inner harbor, served on Little Brewster Island for 132 years. Passing ships would fire their cannons when passing nearby in times of fog, and the keeper would reply with a blast from the light station. Stonington Lighthouse Museum, Connecticut The collection at this quirky keeper’s cottage (the first US lighthouse to be turned into a museum) appeals far beyond maritime fanatics, painting a. Franklin later wrote in his autobiography that the poem was “wretched stuff,” although it “sold prodigiously.” A cannon, America’s first fog signal, was placed on the island in 1719. The young Franklin wrote a poem called The Lighthouse Tragedy and hawked copies on the streets of Boston.
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