Standing on top of Greens Ledge Lighthouse, a mile offshore of Rowayton, Connecticut, I’m surrounded by water and wind in every direction. I’m alone, except for Ollie and Olivia, the two chatty ospreys who return to their nest here each spring—and with a crescendo of shrill chirps, they are making their presence known. Despite the isolation, I’ve always found it hard to feel lonely with a lighthouse in sight.
This one, in particular, is a familiar figure in my life. The red and white beacon of Greens Ledge punctuates many of my childhood memories, an ever-present symbol of the Norwalk coastline. Greens Ledge, the eponymous underwater shoal that the lighthouse marks, was a popular high school fishing spot; during the summer we’d go jigging for bass, bobbing on a boat by the rocks come high tide. Years before that, in elementary school, I wrote a short story about a girl who lived in this very lighthouse and took a sailboat to class each day. My teacher later told me that she thought the story was true at the time, but it was pure fiction—until now, I’d never actually been to the lighthouse itself.
Growing up, nobody was allowed to visit the government-owned property except for the Coast Guard. The kindred connection I felt with this inanimate building—and one I had never stepped foot inside of—is not uncommon in America’s coastal communities. As James Hyland, president of The Lighthouse Preservation Society, tells me: “There’s certainly a spiritual, and also a reassuring, aspect to lighthouses. It’s kind of like the feeling you had when you were a child having a night light in your room that protects you from the dark.”
Out of the 1,500 lighthouses constructed throughout US history, just 779 are still standing today. Greens Ledge is one of the 14 lighthouses that are still active in Connecticut. Built in all shapes and sizes, the maritime bastions were erected up and down the East and West Coasts, but also in more surprising corners of the country, like in the Midwest along the shores of the Great Lakes, and on narrow waterways like Manhattan’s Hudson River. “One of the great altruistic achievements of the American people was the construction of lighthouses to save people’s lives,” Hyland says. “They did just that—and made our shores the safest in the world.”
Boaters today still use Greens Ledge’s light to safely navigate around the mile-long rocky shoal. In 2017, a New York fisherman’s kayak capsized, causing him to tread water for 17 hours through the night. Then, he spotted the lighthouse: “I knew dehydration and eventually hypothermia, you hear the clock ticking,” he told CBS News. “So that last hour and a half, I just put my head down and swam to the lighthouse. It was life and death.”
While lighthouses themselves serve as physical markers of perilous locations—or in this case, live-saving aid—it was their keepers who routinely risked their lives to rescue sailors in distress. In 1910, Leroy Loughborough, an Assistant Keeper at Greens Ledge, was abandoned by his partner and left to maintain both the light and fog signal’s two engines, alone, with dwindling supplies. “During one 72-hour stretch, there was continuous fog, and one of the engines failed,” writes Jeremy D’Entremont in his book Lighthouses of Connecticut. “He struggled vainly to repair the engine, and meanwhile the light burned itself out. When the tender crew arrived to investigate the extinguished light, the assistant keeper was found, almost unconscious and with his dog at his side, on the floor by the engine. Loughborough later said that he would have shared his last biscuit with the dog.”
