Wood Island Lighthouse, Biddeford Pool Maine

Date added: January 08, 2025

Categories:
Maine
Lighthouse

Do you have an update on the current status of this structure? Please tell us about it in the comments below.

Wood Island Light Station was one of two lights established in 1808; the other being at West Quoddy Head in eastern Maine. Of the two, it is the only one that retains the original tower.

Wood Island light was erected on a small shallow island at the mouth of the Saco River. This location was of particular significance due to the heavy maritime traffic in and around the commercial centers of Saco and Biddeford. Both of these communities had developed into important local trading centers during the eighteenth century, and their growth continued into the 1800s. Until the construction of Whaleback Light in 1829, the station at Wood Island was the southernmost of the principal aids to navigation in Maine. (West Quoddy Head, interestingly, is the easternmost light.)

The lighthouse was automated in 1986.

Site Description

The Wood Island Light Station consists of a conical granite light tower connected via a long narrow passageway to the two-story frame, gambrel roof keeper's house. A stone oil house also survives.

Wood Island's light tower, constructed in 1808, stands at a height of forty-seven feet from its base to the lens focal plane. Its southeast face is punctuated by a trio of asymmetrically placed window openings which originally contained a six-over-six double-hung sash. They illuminate the spiral interior stair. The tower supports an iron walkway with a railing and a centrally placed ten-sided lantern. This lantern is a replacement of a late nineteenth-century structure that was removed by the Coast Guard in 1972.

A small gable-roofed frame building with a single window on its east elevation is joined to the southwest face of the tower. Its gable end meets the long, low passageway that extends to the ell of the keeper's house. This structure has two windows and a door on its east wall and a pair of windows and a small gable-roofed addition along the west elevation. The latter was formerly connected to a boathouse which has been pulled down.

Facing south, the keeper's house is sheathed in clapboards and has an enclosed porch across the first story of its facade in addition to a pair of widely spaced gable-roofed dormers. Before twentieth-century alterations, the porch featured eight coupled posts on brick piers behind which were two windows and a center door. The east gambrel end has a pair of symmetrically placed windows on both stories and three in the ell. The fenestration pattern in the main block is repeated on the west end. At the rear, a shed addition with one window abuts the junction of the front block and ell. A window is located to the west of this shed and there is a window and wall dormer above. The ell contains a second-story window and a pent gable end. A pair of brick flues punctuate the roof ridge of the main building and the ell respectively.

Documentary photographs of the Wood Island Light Station show that the previous keeper's house, built in 1858, was a one-and-a-half-story three-bay frame dwelling sheathed in clapboards. Its one-story ell joined the passageway which was covered in board-and-batten siding. The dimensions of this keeper's house and the placement of the two flues indicate that the present configuration was achieved by raising the roof, adding a porch, and increasing the height of the ell. This appears to have been done in the 1890s.

Standing a short distance to the southwest of the dwelling is the rubble stone oil house. Like many others of its type, this building has a gable roof and a door surmounted by a narrow ventilator opening at one end. It was built in 1903.