Burnt Coat Harbor Light Station, Swans Island Maine

Date added: February 25, 2024 Categories:

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The Burnt Coat Harbor Light Station was established in 1872 as a guide to Burnt Coat Harbor on Swan's Island.

The 1871 edition of the Annual Report of the Light-House Board states that the range light at Burnt Coat Harbor was erected as a guide to this harbor of refuge. It further commented that "this harbor is commodious and safe, and is a distant 36 miles from the nearest place of safe anchorage on that coast." The virtually intact exterior features of the dwelling and tower are important examples of the form that these components took in the early 1870s.

Burnt Coat Harbor Light was automated in 1975 by the Coast Guard. The dwelling is currently unoccupied but the tower continues to house an aid to navigation.

Site Description

The Burnt Coat Harbor Light Station, like several others built or rebuilt in the early 1870s, consists of a square tapered brick tower connected to an L-shaped keeper's house that is sheathed in clapboards. A bell house and an oil house also survive.

The tower, which rises to a height of thirty-two feet from its base to the middle of the lantern, is capped by a square iron walkway with a railing. It was built in 1872. A spherical ventilator crowns the ten-sided lantern. There are two twenty-eight pane casement windows on the west face of the tower and a door at the base on the north elevation. The latter was formerly covered by a passageway that linked the tower to the house.

When first built, the station had a range light system employing a pair of widely spaced towers. The second light stood near the site of the present bell house and a covered passageway, built in 1881, connected the two structures. The front range light was discontinued in 1884 and subsequently removed.

Facing west, the one-and-a-half-story keeper's dwelling has a three-bay gable front main block and a south projecting ell. The ell has an engaged porch along its west wall behind which is a doorway and two windows. A door and window opening punctuate the north end. The gable of the main block frames six windows (all of them now boarded shut) Two more are located on the north elevation.

Standing to the south of the light tower is the diminutive bell house. This unusually shaped building, which was erected in 1911, has a rectangular plan whose ends taper inward. A shallow gable roof covers the bell house, and a short walkway leads to a door at one end.

The brick oil house, which was built in 1895, has a door in one gable end and a small ventilator atop the ridge.