The first aids to navigation in America were fires. Soon after Newport, Rhode Island, was founded in 1639, colonists lit fires on Beavertail Point to guide ships at night. Chains of lit beacons also warned of enemy ships along Narragansett Bay, and Boston raised a beacon on Beacon Hill in 1635 to warn inland towns of invasion. Guiding ships safely into port took something more — and the story of how the United States learned to do it runs from 1716 to 2023.
The eras of the American lighthouse
| Period | Who ran the lights | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Colonial (1607–1789) | individual colonies | Merchants petitioned for a lighthouse to mark Boston Harbor in 1713; Boston Light, on Little Brewster, was finished in 1716 — the oldest lighthouse site in North America. Eleven more followed before 1789, including Sandy Hook, New Jersey (1764), the oldest lighthouse still standing in the United States. |
| 1789–1820 | the Treasury Department | In one of its first acts, the new federal government took over all aids to navigation, including the 12 existing lighthouses. By 1820 there were 55. |
| 1820–1852 | Stephen Pleasonton, Fifth Auditor of the Treasury | Frugal and inexperienced at sea, Pleasonton oversaw 32 years of decline. An 1838 naval survey found lights ranging from good to terrible. The first lightship went into service at Willoughby Spit, Virginia, in 1820. |
| 1852–1910 | the U.S. Lighthouse Board | After years of protest, a special board recommended a lighthouse board of naval officers, army engineers and civilian scientists; Congress created it in 1852. |
| 1910–1939 | the Bureau of Lighthouses (Lighthouse Service), Commerce Department | Civilian superintendents; George R. Putnam led it for 25 years, and aids grew to about 24,000. |
| 1939–present | the U.S. Coast Guard | Automation, the end of lightships and of resident keepers. |
The Lighthouse Board's improvements
In 1852 the board took over 331 lighthouses and 42 lightships. It divided the country into 12 districts (the twelfth, the West Coast, got the board's first lighthouses), issued written instructions to keepers, and with the civil service reforms of 1871 and 1883 turned keeping from a patronage job into a professional one.
The Fresnel lens in Boston Light. Credit: NPS photo.
Its most important innovation was the Fresnel lens. Developed by the Frenchman Augustin-Jean Fresnel in the 1810s, it uses concentric rings of prisms to gather light into a central bullseye, giving a far brighter beam than any other lens of its time. By the Civil War every U.S. lighthouse had one. The board also built interlocking-stone towers in wave-swept places and introduced screwpile and caisson foundations; screwpile lights replaced many Chesapeake Bay lightships (down to 24 by 1889, before iron steamships pushed the number back to 56 by 1909). It switched to color-coded iron buoys with bells, then whistles (1876) and gas lights (1882), improved fog signals, and at the end of the era adopted the kerosene-fueled incandescent oil vapor lamp. By 1910 the country had 11,713 aids to navigation, including 1,397 major lighthouses — up from 297 in 1852.
Electricity and automation
Electrification began in 1900 but took off in the 1920s and 1930s as power lines spread, cutting keepers' duties and paving the way for automation. Under the Coast Guard, the Lighthouse Automation and Modernization Program began in the mid-1960s. Lightships gave way to platform structures in the 1960s and large navigational buoys in the 1970s; the last lightship, Nantucket I, was decommissioned in 1985. By 1990 every U.S. lighthouse was automated except Boston Light, which followed in 1998 but kept a keeper under a 1989 act of Congress. With the retirement of Dr. Sally Snowman in 2023, Boston Light no longer has one.
Sources
Based on "History of Lighthouses in the United States" by Nancy S. Seasholes (2009, updated 2025), from the National Park Service (Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area), a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Dennis L. Noble's Lighthouses & Keepers (1997), Sally R. Snowman and James G. Thomson's Boston Light: A Historical Perspective (1999) and the NPS's Lighthouses: An Administrative History.
In these publicationsBoston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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