Marblehead
Marblehead Neck is a peninsular, almost an island, just joined at the southern end by a very narrow natural causeway that nowadays carries a road accross to the affluent community that now occupies it. The area immediately North of the causeway forms Marblehead Harbour, a safe haven for many small pleasure boats.
The present lighthouse, at the neck's northern point was built in 1896 to replace an earlier brick-built lighthouse that dated back to 1835, which had been requested as early as 1831 by local people to mark the entrance to the town's harbour. The original tower was a whitewashed short tapered brick structure, originally topped by a birdcage style lantern room. Quite early in the light's life it was found that the lantern glazing condensated and sweated, the windows in the tower would let water in due to the windows not being recessed enough into the brickwork, and the brick keeper's house suffered from damp. When Marblehead Neck started to be developed for housing in the 1870s, some of the houses obscured the light from certain directions, so in 1883 a new light was exhibited from the top of a tall guyed mast as a temporary measure.
The lighthouse found here today is unique on the New England coastline, although is of a standard type dubbed the "Sanibel Class" lighthouse, of which 13 others exist in the USA; Its unusual structure is made up of 8 tubular iron pilings in a square plan, each one set in concrete and connected together via metal tubing and cross bracing, tapering inwards as the tower rises. The framework of the tower is made up of 5 sections, with a narrow cylindrical tube in the centre, which contains the spiral starecase that gives access to the gallery level, which is an octagonal platform. Located on the gallery level is a circular room, topped by an octagonal lantern, itself surrounded by a second much narrower gallery and railing. Atop the lantern is a conical roof complete with a ball vent. Lighthouses of this type were first built in 1884, providing a tall and robust tower at a fraction of the cost of a traditional masonry lighthouse.
The original lamp exhibited a white light, but was converted to display a fixed red light in 1922 to stand out against the backdrop of lights of the town, being changed again in 1938 to show a fixed green light. Today the tower uses a modern acrylic lamp and continues to display a green light. At christmas time the tower is often decorated with christmas lights draped from the top, and is something of a local landmark.
Originally the ligthouse was manned, and was acompanied by various outbuildings and accomodation for the keepers in the form of a substantial wooden house. An elevated walkway ran between the house and the tower door, however, much of the light station was demolished in 1959 in preparation for the automation of the light in 1960, leaving just the lighthouse tower and an oil store room behind.
Today the tower is located in Chandler Hovey Park, named for the Marblehead resident who in 1948 purchased the land around the lighthouse and donated it to the town of Marblehead.
