How, in attempting to post a single article, I almost got lost down a rabbit hole.
Lighthouses (and other associated devices) are still important navigational aids for shipping traffic around the world. This article, published in the Philadelphia North American in 1913, was written by T. J. Rout, inspector for the United States Lighthouse Service, then a bureau of the Department of Commerce.
“The object of a lighthouse is to indicate dangers to navigation and to guide mariners when approaching or sailing along a coast or river,” wrote Rout, who was in charge of the service’s Fourth District covering Delaware River and Bay. “With this object in view, lighthouses are made of different designs and painted with different colors, and the lights and fog signals are given different characteristics, easily recognizable by the navigator.” In 1913, according to Rout, the Philadelphia district had “88 lights, 189 buoys, 11 fog signals and three day beacons,” maintained by 124 employees.
For more information about lighthouses anywhere in the United States and Canada, check out the remarkably comprehensive and easily searchable lighthousefriends.com, the repository for Kraig Anderson’s lighthouse obsession. It includes histories and photographs of hundreds of lighthouses, maybe thousands. (Only Kraig knows for sure how many.)
A good timeline of the U.S. Lighthouse Service can be found here. A publication form the National Park Service, with interesting illustrations of lighthouse construction, can be found here. Lighthouses are now part of the U.S. Coast Guard, and an article describing this consolidation, from a January 1940 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, can be found here. A poor but readable reproduction of a map of the Fourth Lighthouse District can be found here. A 1923 report of the U.S. Lighthouse Service, with excellent photographs, can be found here.
And now I have to climb up out of this rabbit hole that I never intended to dive into, and leave this lighthouse exploration to Kraig Anderson and others. I have my own rabbit hole (maybe I should call it a water hole) to tend right here.
The article that started me on this journey is used courtesy of the Media (Pa.) Historic Archives Commission, whose collection can be viewed here. But beware: another rabbit hole awaits on the other side of that link. I know, because I created that website as well. I’m not just a water and sewer guy: my interests go beyond wet things. When it comes to information, I am omnivorous, like a rabbit.