![]() ![]() The job of tending to the light –- filling the lamp with oil each evening, cleaning the reflectors of soot - fell to Ida and her mother. Now a house had been built on the island for his family.īut just a few months after moving in, Hosea Lewis suffered a debilitating stroke. ![]() Her father, Hosea Lewis, had been rowing out to tend to the light each evening for the previous four years. Ida was 15 when, in 1857, her family moved onto the tiny island of Lime Rock, only about 220 yards off the mainland in the inner harbor and now home to the Ida Lewis Yacht Club. She is credited with rescuing at least 18 and perhaps as many as 25 people from Newport Harbor during the half-century she lived at the lighthouse. I think after a while all that solitude got boring.”Īt the height of her fame, Ida Lewis probably craved more solitude. Tending to the light “was a very difficult job, and many of were in the middle of nowhere. “You hear all the stories about how romantic a life it was, but it wasn’t very true,” says Kelleher. Of course there is some nostalgic myth mingled in the common story of lighthouse keeping, Kelleher says. Others seem enthralled by the almost monastic lifestyle that their keepers once led to warn passing ships of dangerous shoals. Many visitors are drawn to the lighthouses that have been restored the last few decades, from rusting scrap to historic landmarks. “We have people who come from across the country, who plan their vacations to tour the lighthouses,” says Kelleher.
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