This Lighthouse in Maine was Built in 1857 and Manned Until 1988

Fort Point Light Station, Stockton Springs Maine

Date added: January 28, 2025

Categories:
Maine
Lighthouse

Keeper'S House, Light Tower and Garage, , Southwest and Southeast Sides (1990)

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Established in 1836 at the entrance to the Penobscot River, the Fort Point Light Station has played a significant role in guiding shipping traffic to the important river ports at Bucksport and Bangor.

The Fort Point Light was constructed at a time of rapidly increasing maritime shipping on the Penobscot. Bucksport, the first important community upriver from the station, was a center of local commerce, lumber production, and shipbuilding. Some distance to the north of Bucksport, the city of Bangor built much of its nineteenth-century fortune on lumbering. Bangor underwent a phenomenal period of growth during the second quarter of the nineteenth century as a result of its strategic location with access to interior lumber resources and the availability of a deep river anchorage. For decades this commercial traffic passed down the Penobscot River and in sight of the Fort Point Light.

It was one of the last manned Coast Guard stations in Maine, not automated until 1988.

Site Description

The Fort Point Light Station consists of a square brick tower attached to a one-and-a-half-story I-shaped frame keeper's house. This structure is a replacement of the original light established in 1836. Surviving ancillary buildings include a brick oil house, a barn, and a bell house.

Fort Point's light tower, erected in 1857, rises to a height of twenty-six feet from its base to the center of the lantern. The square configuration is typical of other towers of this type built in Maine during the 1850s. It is capped by a square parapet that projects beyond the walls, and its original octagonal tower is surmounted by a spherical ventilator. There are two stairwell windows on the tower's south elevation. A narrow brick workroom links the tower to the dwelling.

The keeper's house, which also dates to 1857, has a three-bay west facade featuring a pair of six-over-six double-hung sash windows and a door sheltered by a small vestibule at the southwest corner. A long shed-roofed dormer with two windows carries across the roof plane. This particular dormer was constructed over a pair of gable roofed dormers which were 1899 additions to the house. A brick flue punctuates the roof ridge. There are four windows in the north gable end and a door in the one-story ell. The house is covered in clapboards, a replacement sheathing scheme from the original board-and-batten siding.

Standing near the northeast corner of the house is the gable-roofed barn that contains two doors in its west end and a window on each of its other sides. Its date of construction is not positively known, however, a documentary photograph of the station indicates that it was standing here by the 1890s.

Some distance to the north of the house is the brick oil house. This building has pent gable ends, one of which features a door and long, narrow ventilator. It was constructed in 1897.

The bell tower is a pyramidal wooden frame building constructed in 1890. It is sheathed in wood shingles and features pedimented six-over-six windows on two sides, a similarly detailed door on a third side, and the bell structure on the river side. A pyramidal roof crowns the building.