Browns Head Light

Year Built

1832

Cost

$4,000

Type

Cylindrical

Height

20 feet

Location

Browns Head, Vinalhaven

Automated Year

1987

First Lit

1857 (current structure)

Lens Type

Fifth order, Fresnel 1857

Fog Signal

Horn: 1 every 10s

Year Deactivated

Active

Color

White - black lantern

Last Keeper - Date

Charles Lawson (1983 – 1984)

Description

The lighthouse is a cylindrical granite structure with a six-sided lantern house, 18 feet in height, standing with its light about 37 feet above sea level. The light has a range of 15 miles. It is connected by a short covered passageway to the keeper's house, a wood-frame structure.

Brief History

•  A $4,000 appropriation for Brown Head Light Station was approved on March 3, 1831.
•  David Wooster of North Haven was the first keeper to live in the station’s rubblestone dwelling and tend the light in the rubblestone tower, and he served until his death at age sixty-one in 1841.
•   Jeremiah Berry built both of the structures at a cost of $1,800. The tower stood twenty-two feet tall to the base of its octagonal, wrought-iron lantern and exhibited a fixed white light, forty-two feet above mean high water.
•  Collector Chandler, the local lighthouse superintendent, noted on July 27, 1832 that the reflectors in the lantern room were in such bad condition that he assumed they had not been plated.
•  On September 15, 1880, the light was changed “from white to white and red, [with] the red “cut” or sector defining the west channel of entrance to Fox Island Thoroughfare, between Fiddler’s Ledge and the Bay ledges.”