The rough-cut granite trunk of the Newport Harbor Light, its white paint besieged by the elements, climbs steeply above the waters of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. Dawn casts warm, revealing light upon the weathered slab foundation and worn, white-picket fence: it seems that every facet of this old beacon carries the scars of a long, hard-earned life on the New England coast.
Of the exquisite array of lighthouses along Rhode Island’s shores, the relatively plain and diminutive Newport Harbor Light is often overlooked. But this humble beacon, now over 170 years old, has faithfully kept watch over seven generations of mariners and Rhode Islanders alike. If these enduring walls of granite could talk, they would surely tell boundless tales of places long-changed and people long-forgotten.
One of the most unusual stories surrounding the Newport Harbor Lighthouse –perhaps any lighthouse, for that matter– came about in 1921. On November 9 of that year, in an incident that sounds almost unbelievable, a 150-foot-long submarine accidentally rammed into the breakwater upon which the lighthouse and keeper’s cabin stood. The keeper’s cabin was a loss, being demolished shortly afterwards, but the lighthouse thankfully survived and continues guiding vessels to this very day.
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Five Mile Point Lighthouse, built from countless tons of locally quarried brownstone, was completed in 1845 to replace the original wooden lighthouse established on Morris Cove in 1805. But long before even that early lighthouse was built, the shores of this cove hosted a desperate battle which is remembered to this very day.
In 1779, as the American Revolution raged, British troops landed on this beach to launch an invasion of New Haven. Patriot forces fought back and the British are said to have buried their fallen troops quite close to where the lighthouse would eventually be constructed decades later. Although the redcoats managed to push forward and burn several houses and farms, they suffered such heavy casualties that the decision was made to abandon their advance on the city.
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Perched on a seaside bluff where the Thames River empties into Long Island Sound, Avery Point Lighthouse is painted by warm, sunrise light against the deep blues of a cloudless canvas.
For much of New England’s history, lighthouses were always in short supply. They were expensive to build and required ceaseless maintenance. Yet, with each beacon that was finally completed, it seemed that seafarers could think of two more places where new lighthouses were still desperately required to guide vessels through treacherous waters.
For Connecticut, though, that all began to change in the 1900s. There was only a need for so many lighthouses along the shoreline, and for the first time in the state’s long history, it was safe to say that they had all been constructed. The Avery Point Lighthouse, erected during World War II in 1943, would prove to be the last beacon built along Connecticut’s 100-mile coastline.
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In my new piece, “Judson’s Post”, I bring you to the shores of Long Island Sound where calm waters lap at boulders in the shallows. Facing inland, we see the Stratford Point Lighthouse standing tall upon the distant hill behind a seawall of piled rip-rap and a white picket fence. Although the current Stratford Point Light was guiding sailors near the mouth of the Housatonic River since the late 1800s, the history of Stratford Point as the site of a maritime beacon stretches back much further.
Stone and metal lighthouses generally came about beginning in the early 1800s, replacing a generation of earlier wooden lighthouses that had been built during the later 1700s. But colonists and merchants had been navigating the New England coast since the early 1600s and, in an era before lighthouses, they too needed some means of avoiding coastline hazards or locating harbors from afar.
During the earliest colonial years, a great bonfire was lit on Stratford Point during foggy nights whenever a ship was expected to arrive. At some point, an iron hearth was attached to the top of a tall post, elevating the fire above ground level for increased visibility. It wasn’t until 1822 that a true, 28-foot wooden lighthouse was built on Stratford Point. And if that sounds like a long time ago, recall that the settlement of Stratford was already almost two centuries old at that point. The current cast-iron tower replaced the decaying wooden lighthouse in 1880 and has stood on Stratford Point ever since.
I titled “Judson’s Post” (photo at top) in honor of Theodore Judson, who was in his early 30s when he assumed the duty of lighthouse keeper at Stratford Point in 1880. He was just shy of age 70 when he finally retired in 1919, having manned the lighthouse for almost four decades. A truly impressive run by anyone’s standards!
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When I saw some images of the Point Judith Lighthouse come through on the Instagram feed of another Connecticut-based photographer earlier this year, my reaction was immediate: “I need to go there!” But as if the scenery wasn’t going to be exquisite enough, the location of the Point Judith Lighthouse at the mouth of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay made this shoot even more exciting. Why? Despite the fact that Rhode Island is a neighboring state, and was for some number of years only about an hour’s drive away (I live a bit further away now), I had somehow never taken a single photograph there. And it isn’t as if I was intentionally avoiding the ol’ Ocean State. I suppose that I was just preoccupied with other subjects over the years; meanwhile, Rhode Island and all of its compact beauty somehow managed to slip through the cracks. That was all going to change with the Point Judith Lighthouse.
When I selected a date in February for the shoot, I entirely expected that it would be cold. What I could not have imagined was that the thermometer on my dash cluster would read -5°F as I headed east and crossed over the Connecticut border in the frigid darkness before dawn. I had planned for the worst, though, and was decked out from head to toe in three layers. Furthermore, I knew the oppressive winter temperature was just as much of a blessing as a curse: it was a pretty sure bet that I would have Point Judith entirely to myself.
Indeed, there wasn’t a soul to be found when I parked my car at the end of the windswept peninsula. And even though I had done some measure of research ahead of my visit, the scenery at Point Judith proved to be even more exciting than I could have imagined. Take, for example, the beautifully-smoothed boulders piled upon the shoreline in my pieces “Dawn on Point Judith” (at top) and “Narragansett Shores II” (above). Strange as it may seem, there just aren’t beaches that look quite like that in Connecticut.
The Point Judith Lighthouse stands upon the distant horizon in those photographs, but plays a more prominent role in the composition of “Point Judith Wintertide” (above). In this piece, wind-carved grooves in the snow weave through the beachfront beside the tower and the coastal landscape is steeped in the warm colors of dawn. Despite being over 150 years old and having guided seafarers for some six generations, the venerable Point Judith Lighthouse is well-maintained and practically looks as if it had been built less than a decade ago. In an era when tight government budgets can sometimes result in historic lighthouses decaying or being shortsightedly off-loaded to private parties (and lost to the public forever), its refreshing to see that the lighthouse at Point Judith features a level of care and accessibility that is befitting of an age-old maritime relic.
Just how important was the Point Judith Lighthouse in the hey-day of New England’s maritime era? Between June 1871 and June 1872, for example, the keeper at Point Judith kept a tally of every vessel that passed the Point: the final count exceeded 37,000! So although shipwrecks did still occur occasionally off Point Judith, sailors navigating in the vicinity were statistically rather safe thanks to the presence of this wisely-positioned navigational aid.
Oh, did I mention that it was pretty damn cold out there? “Sweet Dawn, Bitter Cold” (above) sums it all up. Only about a dozen feet from the breaking waves, these seashore boulders were glazed with a thick, smooth shell of opaque ice. To be at Point Judith on that February morning at dawn, seeing it entombed in snow and ice and raked by frigid winds blowing in from the Atlantic, I certainly found a renewed appreciation for the brutal elements endured by the mariners of old.
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In my new piece “Lynde Point Seascape” (above), the Lynde Point Lighthouse stands sentinel on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River, its column of neatly stacked windows peering towards the sea from a 65-foot brownstone tower. Foreboding clouds loom overhead, while large slabs of wave-thrown ice batter the nearby seashore.
This is just one of my newly-released works featuring the stately Lynde Point Lighthouse in the context of a frigid New England winter. Built in 1838 to replace an older, dilapidated wooden tower, the present beacon at Lynde Point has remained an active aid to maritime navigation for more than a century and half, even as the land surrounding it transitioned from farms and pastures to lightly-wooded suburbs and sizable beachfront cottages.
But just as captivating as the lighthouse during my visit were the chunks of ice drifting on the waves and settling upon the seashore. From jewel-like bits to massive slabs more than 10 feet across, these bergs drifted down the Connecticut River from the state’s interior, only to quickly wash up on the seashores at either side of the river’s mouth.
Days tossing about in the ocean water left some of the ice slabs beautifully polished, their burrs and edges having melted away to reveal a smooth, glassy finish which glistened even in the faint light filtering down through the heavy morning clouds.
As you can see in my panoramic piece, “Saybrook Vista”, the conditions on this particular morning didn’t exactly offer stunning sunrise colors or dramatic side-lighting. Instead, I was offered some moody, exquisitely-textured cloud cover and only the faint, cool-toned light that was able to filter through. Sure… it’s not the sort of glorious morning that makes you want to lay out a beach towel and stay the afternoon. Then again, would we really expect that sort of idyllic day in late Winter? This is true New England in all of its elemental glory; these are the somber, overcast skies and cold, wind-swept beaches that were part of everyday life for Connecticut mariners of old.
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For nearly 200 years, the Black Rock Lighthouse has been perched upon Fayerweather Island just off the coast of Bridgeport, Connecticut, weathering countless hurricanes, blizzards, floods and even the tireless efforts of several generations of vandals. Against all odds, the Black Rock Light continues to watch over Long Island Sound to this very day, an enduring reminder of a bygone era of Connecticut maritime heritage.
This iconic lighthouse of the Bridgeport coastline is featured in my new pieces, Fayerweather Daybreak (above) and Black Rock Crescendo (below), both of which feature the white hexagonal tower against the glorious light of dawn. Indeed, the Black Rock Light is quite a rare gem, especially when we consider that so much of the view of Bridgeport’s coastline in this area includes industrial buildings and factory smokestacks.
It may be interesting to note that, even though the Black Rock Light is situated on Fayerweather Island, it is one of the few lighthouses left in Connecticut that is accessible by the public on foot. Most of Connecticut’s off-shore lighthouses were constructed upon islands that are relatively distant from the coast, but when the Black Rock Light was built upon Fayerweather Island in the earlier half the 19th-century, it was a mere 1000 feet from the mainland. In fact, folks could even walk to the island on a sandbar that would emerge during low-tide. By 1880s, the decision was made to build a large stone breakwater over the existing sandbar, permanently linking the island to the mainland even during high tide.
The new breakwater would surely have been appreciated by lighthouse keepers and maintenance crews who could now easily move back and forth between the island and mainland without the need for a boat. But in 1933, when the lighthouse was officially decommissioned and essentially left abandoned, the breakwater became an avenue for vandals that gutted and routinely defaced the structure while the ravages of time and environment took their toll. Mercifully, two efforts at restoration were eventually launched, one in the 1980s and the other in the 1990s, which succeeded at stabilizing and beautifying the decaying structure.
Unfortunately, even with the lighthouse now being part and parcel to Bridgeport’s Seaside Park, vandalism remains an on-going issue. During the shoot that I produced Fayerweather Daybreak and Black Rock Crescendo, for example, I found the walls of the lighthouse scribbled with all manner of graffiti which I decided to painstakingly edit out of my final images. The result is that the lighthouse you see in these works is a bit idealized, at least in the sense that it is shown in the context of world where folks might be inclined to respect this old sentinel of Black Rock Harbor rather using it as a personal billboard.
Luckily, if spray paint is the only problem that the Black Rock Light needs to contend with, it’s likely to fare exceptionally well. Upon its completion in 1823, the builders of the Black Rock Light claimed that it had been constructed to “withstand the storm of ages”… so far, it’s done exactly that.
As part of J. G. Coleman’s Decor Series prints, all of the works seen here are available at Fine Art America. You are encouraged to visit his J. G. Coleman’s Fine Art America eStore, or see all of Fine Art America’s connecticut art.
On this day last year, I had recently returned from a fantastic honeymoon in the Caribbean. My wife, Mary, and I had spent several days on the mountainous tropical island of St. Lucia, and even though we were back in Connecticut and had been back to work for a handful of days already, I probably still had a couple East Caribbean Dollars lingering in my wallet. Even now, a full year later, so many aspects of that once-in-a-lifetime getaway are fresh in my mind: breath-taking views of the thickly-forested Piton mountains, a rejuvenating ocean breeze sweeping endlessly over the coastline, a seemingly endless array of fresh food and drink… and all of it with the love of my life beside me!
So why the reminiscing? Because my latest piece, “Morning on Lighthouse Point”, comes to you from Lighthouse Point Park in New Haven, Connecticut. It was here at this seaside park on the Connecticut coast that my wife and I got married a little over a year ago in view of the old Five Mile Point Light. So while it may have been the distant beaches of the Caribbean where we celebrated our marriage for days afterward, it was the soft rhythm of the waves coming off Long Island Sound that serenaded our ceremony.
The lighthouse seen in “Morning on Lighthouse Point”, known traditionally as the Five Mile Point Light for its distance from the center of New Haven, was activated in 1847 after being constructed from a variety of locally-quarried stone. It had replaced an earlier lighthouse which was shorter, dimmer and terribly insufficient when it came to protecting sailors from running their ships into jagged rock outcroppings of New Haven Harbor. This newer lighthouse was a vast improvement over the older structure and cost roughly $10,000, a small fortune in the mid-1800s. Yet for all the improvements that went into the new light on Lighthouse Point, it’s usefulness was short-lived. By 1877, only three decades after its completion, it was rendered obsolete once the Southwest Ledge Light was constructed at a more visible point out in the harbor.
Despite being 166 years old and out of service for more than a century, the Five Mile Point Light probably enjoys a greater “iconic status” now than it ever did back when it was thought of as a mundane navigational aid. While it no longer acts as a beacon for sailing ships, it nonetheless serves as the centerpiece and namesake of a beautiful stretch of shoreline along New Haven Harbor, quietly watching over countless beach-goers and proudly standing witness to several weddings every year.
