Keeping the Lights On

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added Matinicus Rock Light to its Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge as a result of the Maine Lights Program.

How the Maine Lights Program saved dozens of lighthouses and became a beacon for national preservation efforts

Issue: June 2020

By: Philip Conkling
Photography: Peter Ralston

Two years after the completion of the property transfers, Congress passed the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act. The act, modeled on the Maine Lights Program, established a national process for transferring any historic federal properties across the country to government agencies and private nonprofit groups. Bob Trapani, who heads the American Lighthouse Foundation (ALF), says, “The Maine Lights Program showed Congress and the country that transferring these historic properties could work, and work well.”

ALF set its sights on several lighthouse properties that were left unclaimed at the end of the Maine Lights Program in 1998, including Little River Light on a small island off Cutler. The lighthouse had been automated in 1975 with a modern light erected on a nearby steel skeleton tower that, although functional, was neither historic nor attractive. In 2001 the original cast-iron light tower was leased to ALF, which restored it. A revolving beacon was installed in the original tower and “relit” after 26 years of darkness on October 2, 2001, during a ceremony attended by over 1,000 people. People can now stay over-night in the restored keeper’s house through a program run by ALF and the Friends of Little River Light. The program is so popular that it’s providing funds to put back into the site. “It’s making money,” says Trapani, “and more money every year.”

Marshall Point Light in Port Clyde was transferred to the town of St. George and is managed by the local museum that had restored the keeper’s house.

With much of its focus on Maine’s remote lighthouses, ALF moved its headquarters from Wells to Rockland in 2007. In recent years, Trapani has worked with local partners to raise funds to renovate the Rockland Breakwater Light, which he calls “a one-of-a-kind lighthouse that defines Rockland as a seaside town.” Along with the Friends of Rockland Breakwater Light, local citizens and lighthouse lovers have raised over $275,000 to restore this structure.

Trapani notes that Maine’s lighthouses, with all their challenges, attract people from all over the world. “They are places of solitude. The quiet is amazing,” he says. “They are places where you make life-changing decisions.” Trapani says that the Maine Lights Program, initiated by Peter Ralston during a phone call with an imaginative Coast Guard civilian, “showed organizations around the country that a model program could work, that private owners could help save the nation’s lighthouse heritage, and that we can get communities behind the program. The Maine Lights Program was like a beacon of light that pointed the way.”

The American Lighthouse Foundation manages the Rockland Breakwater Light Station at the end of the Rockland Breakwater.