Ready to roll...
by Susan on 04/21/14
It's only April, but we're all about lighthouses once again!
Today we received notice that Yankee Magazine selected us as 2014 “Editors’ Choice” winner in Yankee Magazine’s Travel Guide to New England. We won for Best Lighthouse Tour! This designation is awarded by Yankee’s editors and contributors who name select restaurants, lodgings, and attractions in New England to the exclusive list. For 38 years, Yankee Magazine’s Travel Guide to New England has been the most widely distributed and
best-selling guide to the six-state region, providing readers with a
comprehensive vacation-planning tool and daily reference.
The Summer Lighthouse Boat Tours have grown since the we took ownership of our first lighthouse (October 2010), from one weekend in 2011 to 16 weekends in 2014. The boats are small, the trip is exciting! Running the trips is an all-volunteer effort and the New London Maritime Society's major fund-raising activity for preserving the area's lighthouses. Our volunteers have a lot to be proud of! This year, we also are restoring New London Harbor 'Pequot' Light--the oldest and tallest lighthouse on Long Island Sound so this award is especially significant for us; it will give the program a terrific boost! Thank you Yankee Magazine!
Our spring campaign to raise money for the New London Harbor Lighthouse restoration in honor of Ben Martin passed $39,000 Friday! Thank you all! We have had many contributions, larger & smaller, but all heart-felt with true love for the lighthouse. Thank you.Work continues at the lighthouse, both Hurricane Sandy restoration funded at 75% by FEMA, and preliminary testing in advance of the lighthouse restoration, which begins in another month. This week, mason Harald Hefel continued to replace storm-damaged walls on the lighthouse property; using our one original as a model, Dave Fallon and David Lersch are donating the remaking brass lighthouse vent controls for the lighthouse lantern room; and masons Scott Loring and sons have been carefully opening up test sections of interior lighthouse walls to determine how the tower was built. What they've discovered can partially be seen in this photo taken in a window well. The original tower is granite with a 16" facing of brownstone. (Did you know: originally the lighthouse was not painted but left with the brownstone finish.) In the mid 1800s, the lighthouse's original 1801 wooden stairway was replaced with a cast-iron circular stair. At that time, the interior of the lighthouse was lined with brick to fit around the new stairway. What Scott Loring discovered is that between the original wall and the brick lining is a hollow space, but the two walls are tied together with brick flanges at several points. In mid-May, the scaffolding will be in place to redo the exterior of the lighthouse. It is important to know that this tower is not a single compressed mass, but two individual structures.