The Gay Head Lighthouse in Aquinnah went dark last November for what was meant to be a lamp replacement with some structural repairs. Instead, workers discovered the lantern deck needed more extensive work than expected. They removed the original cast-iron components and shipped them off to Pennsylvania for renewal by the Robinson Steel Company.

“They took the window wall out of the room where the beacon sits, and they took the iron roof off,” Aquinnah town administrator Jeffrey Madison explained. 

Scaffolding shrouded the top of the lighthouse well into June of this year as repairs continued. “[We’re] just making sure that the job is getting done right and that everything’s getting repaired as it should be for the next 150 years,” lighthouse keeper Chris Manning told the Vineyard Gazette.

This wasn’t the first time the keepers of the light had looked far into the future while attempting to preserve its past. In 2015 the Island watched with anticipation as the fifty-one-foot-tall beacon was lifted off its foundation, balanced on a one-hundred-ton steel frame, and rolled ever so slowly along two massive steel beams. Over the course of three days, the lighthouse was moved from its prior location – some forty-five feet from the edge of a badly eroding cliff – to a new location, 129 feet away. 

Although the actual moving of the lighthouse was accomplished quickly, it took years of intensive planning and fundraising to reach that point. Town officials had long worried that the lighthouse needed to be relocated before erosion made it impossible to move, but the United States Coast Guard was unwilling to undertake such an endeavor. If the people of Aquinnah wanted to move the lighthouse, they needed to own it, they were told. In 2014, they got their chance.

That year, the federal government declared that the lighthouse was no longer “mission critical” and designated it as surplus property. Under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000, the Coast Guard is allowed to transfer ownership of surplus lighthouses at no cost to qualified state or local governments or nonprofit organizations. 

While the lighthouse would ultimately be transferred at no cost, moving it would cost millions of dollars. A committee of volunteers, first formed in 2012, had already begun raising funds with the announcement that the National Trust for Historic Preservation had put the Gay Head Light on its 2013 list of America’s eleven most endangered historic places.

“This was not a false alarm. It was going to topple,” said Jim Pickman, who chairs the Gay Head Lighthouse Advisory Board.

By 2015, the fund for moving the lighthouse reached $3.4 million, with contributions from all six Island towns, $350,000 in grants, and more than $2 million by 1,000 individual donors. 

International Chimney Corporation (now known as ICC Commonwealth) was brought on to handle the logistics of moving the 400-ton structure on top of an eroding cliff. It was novel work, extensively catalogued in local and national press and at least two documentaries, but it was also well within ICC’s area of expertise. They had previously moved several other United States lighthouses, as well as the Shubert Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.

Throughout the spring, about 3,500 tons of soil, clay, and boulders were removed around the base of the lighthouse to make way for the long steel beams that would serve as tracks for the structure’s move. Along with ICC, other companies working on the site included Expert House Movers from Maryland, which helped remove soil from the site, and John Keene Excavators of West Tisbury, which hauled it away.

The massive dig uncovered artifacts large and small: foundations from a former lightkeeper’s cottage and a World War II lookout tower, milk and Coca-Cola bottles from local plants, fragments of whaling-era chinaware, and even the original surveyor’s stake, which was presented to lighthouse relocation committee chair Len Butler. Most of these finds are now housed at the Aquinnah Cultural Center.

Much like earlier this year, the lantern atop the lighthouse was turned off during construction. It remained dark from April 16 until August 11, 2015, when donors, government officials, and lighthouse movers and shakers gathered in the pouring rain to watch as a ribbon was cut and the now-complete lighthouse was illuminated again. 

“I have not been involved in a transaction that was this special or this meaningful,” Carol Chirico of the General Services Administration, which oversaw the transfer of the lighthouse from the Coast Guard to the town, said at the time. “That’s because of the people involved and the passion that they have for this lighthouse.” 

It could have been a very different outcome, at a time when the federal government was unloading lighthouses that it no longer deemed worth the cost of their upkeep. 

“The Coast Guard has stated on several occasions that they have no interest in moving [the lighthouse],” Butler said in a 2014 interview with the Gazette. “If it did fall into the sea, they would put up a steel tower with a blinking light.”

To keep that from happening, the people of Aquinnah – and their neighbors across the Island – came together in a well-coordinated, literally monumental mission to preserve the storied red-brick tower and its guiding light.

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The beacon at the westernmost tip of the Island isn’t only the oldest lighthouse on the Vineyard; it’s also one of the oldest in the United States. It was one of the first commissioned by the federal government in the early years of American independence, when nearly all trade and travel took place by sea. 

“There were virtually no lighthouses on the American coast at the time of the Revolution,” said Bow Van Riper, research librarian at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Vineyard Haven and an expert on Island history. Apart from the occasional wildfire or bonfire, much of the eastern shoreline remained unlighted and invisible in fog, blinding mariners to the contours of the land and the hull-crushing rocks and shallows offshore.

The death toll from shipwrecks inspired some morbid names for the East Coast’s most treacherous passages. The waters off outer Cape Cod – where some 1,000 ships have gone down between Provincetown and Chatham – are among several stretches dubbed Graveyard of the Atlantic, while the rocky shoal that runs from the foot of the Gay Head Cliffs northwest towards Cuttyhunk became known as Devil’s Bridge. 

For mariners caught on its rocks, Devil’s Bridge might truly have come straight from Hell, to crush their ships and fling them helplessly against a lee shore. But the Wampanoag people, who have lived on the Vineyard for an unbroken 13,000 years – since before the sea rose and made it an island – have a more benevolent origin story for the string of glacial boulders, where fish teem in the shifting waters and crustaceans roam the rocky seafloor.

As told by Bettina Washington, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) and a member of the Gay Head Lighthouse Advisory Board, the rocks that are now mostly under the waves were put there by Moshup, the legendary giant who created Noepe – later called Martha’s Vineyard – and brought the Tribe here under his protection. “They asked Moshup to create a bridge off the cliffs, so he started,” Washington said. “Halfway through, this crab comes. He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m hungry. Moshup’s toe looks good.’ So he grabbed it. Moshup dropped the rocks, flung the crab, and that was the end of the bridge,” she said.

As sea levels rose around the Island, Moshup’s abandoned causeway slipped beneath the waves, known for centuries only to the Wampanoags who fished its currents from their mishoons – low-sided, shallow-drafted canoes carved from tree trunks. 

“They’re not traveling in these massive ships with thirty-foot hulls under water,” said Manning, a tribal member who grew up in Aquinnah.

Unlike mishoons, European-style sailing vessels were built for long ocean voyages with cargo, crew, and passengers, and bulked large both below and above the waterline, making them vulnerable to undersea obstacles and hard to control in high winds.

“The western entrance to Vineyard Sound is not where you want to be guessing,” Van Riper said. “The last thing you want to do is find yourself south of the Vineyard, south of Nantucket, where there’s absolutely no shelter if a storm blows up from the south or something goes sideways with your ship.”

Despite its dangers, the passage between Gay Head and the Elizabeth Islands became a key route to and from the Americas, sailed by tens of thousands of ships a year – from speedy freighters and revenue cutters to passenger ships of all sizes, along with merchantmen carrying commercial cargos and whalers bound out and back on voyages that could take years and span the globe.

“When shipping was really the only way to move goods and people great distances up and down the coast, Vineyard Sound was one of the most heavily trafficked shipping lanes in the world,” Manning said. 

More ships meant more shipwrecks, making lighthouses an early priority for the federal government. On August 7, 1789 – now celebrated as National Lighthouse Day – the United States Congress signed its ninth act: to establish and support lighthouses, buoys, and other navigational aids. The first United States lighthouse completed under the ownership of the federal government went up in 1791 on Portland Head, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), followed in 1792 by one at the mouth of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay.

Reinforcing the economic importance of safer shipping lanes, Congress initially made local customs collectors – who previously were charged only with revenue-related tasks – responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the lighthouses in their districts. In later years, a federal lighthouse service oversaw the beacons until 1939, when President Franklin Roosevelt placed the Coast Guard in charge.

It was a Nantucketer, Massachusetts state Senator Peleg Coffin Jr., who called in 1796 for a lighthouse at Gay Head to protect marine traffic. By this time, the whaling industry was Nantucket’s principal economic engine and a growing force in New Bedford and Edgartown. Devil’s Bridge was a constant threat to the prosperity of these and other ports: the loss of a whale ship, nearly home after rounding South America with its hold filled with barrels of oil from a years-long voyage to the Pacific, spelled financial ruin for investors – including Coffin, a financier with his own marine insurance company. 

President John Adams authorized the construction of the Gay Head Light in 1798 and it went into service on November 7, 1799, with a whale-oil lantern blazing white to signal mariners of their location and warn them away from Devil’s Bridge. This was not the lighthouse we know today. Instead, it was built of wood, with eight sides and a low roofline to reduce the effect of scouring winds. 

Ebenezer Skiff, appointed to keep the new light, became the first non-Wampanoag to live in Gay Head. He was followed by a succession of other keepers who, often with their families, lived largely in isolation at the Island’s windswept western end.

Charles Vanderhoop Sr. became the first Wampanoag lighthouse keeper in 1920, assisted by fellow tribal member Max Attaquin. The two are thought to be the first Native American lighthouse keepers anywhere in the country, said Van Riper. 

Numerous other Wampanoags, including Vanderhoop’s son Charles Vanderhoop Jr., have held the assistant keeper’s role over the years, but Manning, appointed in 2021, is the first member of the Tribe to be named chief lighthouse keeper since the senior Vanderhoop a century before.

In 1844, the wooden lighthouse had to be moved seventy-five feet back from the cliff edge. The original location is now about a football field’s length out to sea, said Deborah Medders, head docent for the Gay Head Light. Eleven years later, it was decided that the lighthouse should be moved again. This time, a new tower was built – of bricks made with clay from the nearby cliffs – and sited farther inland. 

The new tower featured a famous, first-order Fresnel lens that had been exhibited at the Paris World’s Fair. There, it won an award before it was carefully shipped to the Island and drawn to Gay Head by oxen train. The towering lens was made with more than 1,000 crystal prisms, to both refract and reflect the lamplight into a night-piercing stream of brilliant white. 

“The flame from the sperm whale oil would project that light about twenty miles [out] to sea,” Manning said. 

The multifaceted lens, named for its French inventor, was so effective at focusing all available light that some said it had to be covered with a cloth bag on sunny days to keep it from starting fires. “Of all the pictures that exist of the lighthouse when it did have the Fresnel, only a handful show the lens exposed,” Manning said.

Medders said the bag may simply have been there to protect the lens from dust, given the constant labor required to keep its 1,008 prisms clean and polished.

At night, the light was visible from so far off that in 1874, the lighthouse board added cranberry-colored glass panels that altered the beam pattern from four white flashes to three whites and a red, so that mariners could quickly distinguish Gay Head Light from other flashing white beacons along the coast. 

“For the same reason, a few [decades] later they changed East Chop Light from red to green, because it’s an enormous help, if you’re out there on the deck of your ship and you can see a lighthouse flashing on the horizon, to be able to [identify it] either by the sequence of flashes or the color of the flashes or both,” Van Riper said.

With the new brick tower and its famous Fresnel lens in place, lighthouse keeper Samuel Flanders found himself entertaining throngs of sightseers. A steamship dock was built at the bottom of the cliffs to accommodate the crowds, who arrived by paddle-wheeler from as far away as New York to see the very latest in lighthouse technology.

***

Visitors today can get an eye-level view of the Fresnel lens at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, where it has pride of place in the atrium. The 171-year-old lens was decommissioned in the early 1950s, when electrification finally reached Gay Head. A new lamp, still shining white-white-white-red, was installed in its place.

That pattern remained until 1989, when the light was temporarily extinguished in order to replace it with a halogen aerobeacon that alternated white and red. When the Coast Guard announced it would install a high-efficiency light-emitting diode (LED) bulb earlier this year, town administrator Madison – a Wampanoag who grew up in the white-white-white-red days – saw the new lamp as a golden opportunity to restore the historic flash pattern. 

And yet the Coast Guard – which continues to control the lantern although the town maintains the lighthouse – refused at first to authorize the change. 

Madison asked a second time, got a second no, and then called for backup from United States Senator Ed Markey. 

“Within two days I heard back from his office that the Coast Guard had reconsidered,” Madison said. “There’s a lot of old-time Gay Headers who will remember that [flash pattern] and will appreciate it coming back.”

Aquinnah resident and Outermost Inn owner Hugh Taylor, whose family summered up-Island, recalled watching the lighthouse from his bedroom window as a small child in the 1950s. 

“I was enamored with it, and I remember thinking, ‘I would love to build a house where I could see a lighthouse,’” Taylor said.

He did exactly that in 1971 on Lighthouse Road with his wife, Jeanne, who is the great-great-granddaughter of nineteenth-century Gay Head Light keeper Samuel Flanders. A few years later, Hugh’s brother James Taylor sang about the beacon in his 1975 ballad “Lighthouse”: “Shine like a lighthouse for one last summer night / See me flashing on, flashing, fading away.”

Hugh and Jeanne’s son Isaac Taylor grew up to become a singer-songwriter in his own right. Following his forebears on both sides of the family, he’s also Manning’s assistant lighthouse keeper.

“High above the shore, her light shines through my home front door / She shines red and then three whites, she’s been spinning beams through my darkest of nights,” Isaac sings in his own 2018 tribute to the Gay Head Lighthouse, “Beams of the Queen.”

The grounds of the relocated beacon have been named Len Butler Memorial Park in honor of the relocation committee chairman, who died in 2023. 

“He was the person who made it happen, from a structural point of view, on a very complicated project. Everyone liked him, and yet he could get people to do things,” Pickman said. “I think of him all the time.”

The lighthouse stands today as a tribute to Butler and all of the Islanders who pitched in to preserve it, both as a monument to the past and a living element of the Vineyard’s coastal culture. 

“This is a true historic structure that is fulfilling a historic function as a lighthouse – that, to me, is important,” Pickman said.

And yet it continues to play another historic role as well – that of an enduring tourist attraction.

“People come to Gay Head to see the light,” Medders said.