Keepers at less hospitable locations, such as Thatcher Island or Boston Light, earned $266.67. His salary of $200 per annum was lower than at other lighthouses because the Gurnet was deemed an acceptable place to live with ample fishing and land with good soil to garden. government, and John Thomas took over as keeper. Keeper Burgess fed and warmed them beside the fire, dispatching his assistant, possibly Hannah’s son John, to bring in the rest of the crew. Two of the seamen from the vessel trudged seven miles through a bitter snowstorm to reach Gurnet Lighthouse. Hannah hired Nathaniel Burgess to serve as keeper in 1786, and that same year a coasting sloop traveling from Boston to Plymouth struck a sand bar near the Gurnet. Before residents of the Gurnet could construct a causeway over the ice to reach the stranded vessel, seventy-two of the vessel’s crew of just over a hundred froze to death in view of the light.Īfter the Revolutionary War, the lighthouse was refurbished and put back in service with Hannah Thomas as keeper. As the gale rose to hurricane force, the vessel drug anchor and ran aground on White Flats. Choosing to forego the risk of entering Plymouth’s inner harbor without a pilot, the captain dropped anchor and hoped to ride out the storm. Plymouth’s worst shipwreck occurred in 1778, when the American privateer General Arnold was trapped in a blizzard less than a mile from Plymouth Light. At least one local historian, Richard Boonisar, disputes that that event ever took place, but it is known that for strategic reasons the lighthouse was not lit during a portion of the war, although the exact dates are unclear. Niger reportedly sailed around the Gurnet toward Plymouth Harbor, exchanging fire with the fort’s six-cannon battery and, many believe, destroying one of the lighthouse beacons in the process. In 1776, after Fort Andrew was erected at Gurnet Point, the H.M.S. Along with raising their three children, Hannah took over John’s lighthouse post, making her the first female lighthouse keeper in America. He recruited a regiment of volunteers from Plymouth County to help repel the British in the Siege of Boston, and then as a major general led troops in Quebec, where he died of small pox on June 2, 1776. John, a surgeon, was hired as the first keeper and served until he joined the Continental Army. The lighthouse was built on land rented for five shillings a year from John and Hannah Thomas. The twin lights, exhibited at a height of eighty-six feet above the sea, distinguished the station from the single light used at Boston. Under the direction of the Massachusetts Legislature, the first Plymouth Lighthouse, a wooden keeper’s dwelling measuring fifteen by thirty feet and equipped with a lantern at each end of its roof, was completed in September 1768 at a cost of £660. By the 1770s, seventy-five fishing vessels were based in the area, and at one point, nearby Duxbury was one of the world’s leading shipbuilding centers. The Gurnet became part of Plymouth on January 7, 1638. When Samuel de Champlain arrived in 1606 to map the Gurnet and Clark’s Island, he found thick pine forests and Native Americans fishing for cod using lines made of tree bark with wooden fish hooks to which a spear-shaped bone was attached. Station’s twin lights and keeper’s dwelling Springtime finds the crisp salt air scented by beach rose, pine, and cedar, dune grass sways in the breeze, light plays off the water onto the pebbled shore, and new plants gleam like emeralds. Along with its cold, protected waters rich in sea life, the Pilgrims and other earlier settlers may have been drawn by its wild beauty. The Pilgrims knew the land as “the gurnett’s nose,” apparently naming the area for similar headlands in the English Channel, where the gurnet fish flourished along Devonshire’s shores. The Gurnet, a twenty-seven-acre peninsula forming the northern boundary of Plymouth Bay, is located 3.8 nautical miles northeast of Plymouth Rock. It was home to America’s first set of twin lights and first female lighthouse keeper, and is now home to the country’s oldest freestanding wooden lighthouse. Plymouth Light, or Gurnet Light as it is known locally, lays claim to an impressive list of lighthouse titles.
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