Sally Snowman at garden tower

Sally's Boston Light Shuttle sped across the calm gray water from Hull Gut to Boston Light.  At the helm was Weymouth, Mass. resident Sally Snowman, the recently named civilian keeper of the oldest lighthouse site in the country, a beacon whose light has guided ships through the treacherous waters of Boston Harbor since 1716.

As the small boat approached Little Brewster Island, a light flashed every 10 seconds from the top of the slender 100 foot tall white cylinder, a light that can be seen for 27 miles. It was low tide, and seaweed draped the rocks on the edge of the two-mile island like a straggly brown blanket.

The little shuttle pulled up to a huge portable dock, made up of nine separate pieces of iron which banged and sighed as steel hit steel under the gentle waves.  Sally Snowman was home.

She had been a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, standing watch over the lighthouse for 10 years. In August, she was named the keeper.  In this role, dressed in colonial garb in deference to the founding of the lighthouse, she conducted tours during the visitor’s season.

During these tours, several times a day, she sprinted up the 77 narrow winding stairs to the light tower and up two even narrower ladders to the top, all the while cheerfully explaining the mechanism of the light to her visitors, some clutching the steel railings with white knuckles.

“Boston Light's lens still does the job of a modern beacon.  It magnifies the light of a single 1,000-watt lamp to two million candlepower and is visible for 27 miles,” she says to the visitors.

She tells how the light is stationary. The blinking comes from rotating magnifying glasses with bulls-eye centers.  Occasionally she must oil the mechanism to assure its relentless turning.

During tourist season, her home is the keeper's house, built in 1884 and restored in 1980, a warm two-story three-bedroom home with a huge kitchen and living room which looks out onto the lighthouse and the sea beyond.  Lighthouse replicas are everywhere in the house: paintings, post cards, calendars, statues, and stain glass window decorations.

The only modern day intrusions are an entertainment center, an exercise machine, a worn pillow of Elvis Presley, and a dog bed for Sam, the black lab who belongs to the Coast Guard and has lived on the island for over a decade.

The keeper's job does not require overnight coverage, but Boston Light got the best of both worlds from Sally.  "During tourist season, I was a paid civilian lightkeeper from 9 to 5 and a Coast Guard volunteer from 5 to 9," she said.

Off season, Sally lives in at her home in Plymouth, Mass. and works a desk job in Boston for the Coast Guard.  She develops curriculum on Boston Light for fourth graders that can be used as the basis for field trips and then reinforced in the classroom.  She is also creating a program to train tour guides.

Blizzard Picture January '05

She visits the Lighthouse at least once a month during the winter.  The island will be staffed by 42 Coast Guard auxiliary volunteers during this time.

For the fall and winter, only Sally's shuttle and occasional Coast Guard boats will pull up to the island, the visitors clamoring up a small ladder and a large orange hoist carrying their gear.  The dock leads to a permanent concrete pier.  To the left are the steel remnants of a second pier destroyed during the '78 Blizzard.

In 1899, a boathouse replaced one blown down in an 1898 gale.  It is now a workshop and stores the station boat.  Inside is a display of charts and photos of lighthouse life.

Sally began her job as civilian keeper in August, 2003.  “I was ecstatic when she was chosen,” she said.  In the Coast Guard Auxiliary for 27 years, her love of the sea began at Wessagusset Yacht Club in Weymouth where her father launched several boats over his lifetime, all called Seneca.  She has her doctorate in education and, today, when not tending her lighthouse, she teaches a master's degree program at Curry College.

In her youth, Sally's love of the sea was equaled by a passion for history. Her family belonged to the Weymouth Militia and took part in colonial encampments all over New England.  "In 1975, the encampments hit their peak, and then interest began to fade," she said.

So Sally concentrated on her love of the sea and joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

During her years darting back and forth from the mainland to Boston Light, she met another Coast Guard volunteer who shared her passion for the lighthouse, James Thomson.

They married at the foot of Boston Light in 1994.  She wore a colonial dress she made while in the militia.  She and her husband have written a definitive book about their shared interest called "Boston Light: A Historical Perspective."

In Pilgrim times, Boston's main shipping channel ran between Little Brewster and Hull.
In the 1600s, mariners could not distinguish this channel from impassible inlets in the north.  The channel became a watery graveyard of shipwrecks.

In 1713, Boston merchants persuaded the Legislature to build a beacon on Little Brewster Island that would mark the harbor entrance.  When its stone tower was completed in 1716, Boston Light was the first lighthouse in America.

Moon at night

Today, the light is an aid to navigation and the last light still staffed by the Coast Guard.  “A civilian lighthouse keeper was chosen because active duty Coast Guard members, who number only 35,000 nationwide, could best be used for law enforcement in these troubled times,” Sally said.

Sally's life as a lighthouse keeper is worlds apart from her predecessors.  Before 1960, keepers lived with their families on the island.  The head keeper inhabited the house where Sally lives now.  "There were as many as 19 children here at one time," Sally said.

Until recently, many Boston Harbor islands were inhabited, and Boston Light families visited island friends.  Children were either rowed to the mainland daily for school, took up permanent residence on the mainland during the school year, or had a teacher rowed to the island each day for lessons.

Little is known about the lives of keepers from 1715 to 1859.  "We know there was one keeper, one house, and one family, but because there were no cameras, we can only guess what the house looked like," Sally said.

Sally tells the story of a keeper, his wife, his daughter, and a servant who drowned in the harbor during a storm.

An oil house on the island, now used for storage, is a tribute to the labor intensive work of keepers before the light was illuminated in 1948.  The keeper's daily work began in this building, where he poured fuel for the tower lamps into an oil can. He carried these cans up the 76 winding stairs and two ladders into the lantern room of the lighthouse.

He cleaned soot from the lamps, polished brasswork, trimmed wicks, maintained buildings, and wound the mechanical clock that kept the light glowing.

Island families pumped water from a cistern into their homes by hand until 1960. Keepers' wives washed family clothes by hand, heating wash water over a coal stove. Candlelight, and then kerosene lamps, lit the three households at night even after the Coast Guard electrified the light tower in 1948.

Today, Sally and her Coast Guard volunteers use bottled water for cooking and drinking and the cistern for other uses.

The light and fog signal are fully automated.  In fog, the keepers of old operated the fog signal and watched for vessels in distress.  In storms, keepers and their families sheltered shipwreck victims and the crews who saved them.  The first foghorn, on display in a museum at the base of the lighthouse, was a signal cannon.  This was replaced by a huge horn.  Today, the fog signal is fully automated and set to go off if a sensor picks up a wall of moisture within a mile. It beeps every 30 seconds.

The original stone tower fell victim to the American Revolution.  Colonists burned out its wooden interior in 1775 to stymie the British military when they arrived to occupy Boston.  When the British evacuated from Boston the following year, they blew up the tower on their way out of the harbor.

Lighthouse Lens

In 1783, the tower was rebuilt. It has been modified several times, most dramatically in 1859 when the tower lantern was raised several feet to accommodate a second-order Fresnel lens that still operates today.  Many lighthouses lost their Fresnel lenses after 1945, when the Coast Guard automated light stations.

Sally was rarely alone last summer on her isolated island.  Her husband visited on weekends, and she had her trusty dog Ben, "who is such a good watchdog that he barks when a kayaker is already on the porch where I can see him anyway."

A Coast Guard volunteer must be with her at all times when she shuttles her cutter from the mainland to Brewster Island and stands watch during the day.  One such volunteer is Bob Smith, who often crews Sally's shuttle.

Bob explained how he became a volunteer. "I bought a boat and figured I could run it without any training. I thought it was just like driving a car, but I kept cracking it up.  At about the fifth time, someone told me I should take a boating course.  I did, and I learned about reading charts and maps.  I really became interested in boating and got into search and rescue, then into the Coast Guard Auxiliary," he said.

A social worker, Bob spends his days off on the island as a volunteer watch keeper.  After a recent nor'easter, he spent his five-day watch hauling heavy rocks which washed up onto the ramp to the lighthouse back to the small beach which surrounds the island. Sally and her husbanded aided in the cleanup.

The Coast Guard evacuates the island if a major storm is predicted.

"There were no bad storms last year," Sally said.

Editor’s note: If you are interested in the Boston Light Augmentation program and would be willing to volunteer your services, please click here for more information about the program.