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American Lighthouse Foundation, Inc.
P.O. Box 565
Rockland,
Maine 04841
Phone: 207-594-4174
Fax: 207-596-1091
info@lighthousefoundation.org
The American Lighthouse Foundation is a
Non-Profit 501(c)(3) Organization dedicated to the
preservation of America's historic
lighthouses & lightships and
their heritage.
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Finicky Fog Bells
By Jeremy D'Entremont
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When fog bells
first came on the scene at American lighthouses in the early 1800s, the
keepers had to sound them by hand in time of storms and fog. After a
while things improved with the introduction of automatic striking
mechanisms, Rube Goldberg-like contraptions that involved a clockwork
mechanism that had to be wound every few hours.
The
introduction of automatic bell-striking technology may have been an
advancement in technology, but it meant the keepers had more equipment
to maintain. And it was not terribly unusual for the |
A 19th
century illustration of
a keeper
by the fog bell at
Minot’s
Ledge Lighthouse, Massachusetts
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machinery to fail,
meaning the keeper or family
members had to resort to ringing the bell by hand, either by using a hammer
or by pulling an attached rope. Lighthouse literature is filled with story
after story about superhuman efforts under such circumstances.
Charles Slocum
Curtis became keeper at Rose Island Lighthouse, near Newport, Rhode Island,
in 1887. Curtis saw plenty of change in his 31 years at the station,
including the replacement of the fog bell by a new horn. While the bell was
still in use, Keeper Curtis and his wife, Christina, had to go ashore one
day. They left their daughter, Mabel, alone on the island. Thick fog
abruptly rolled in. Young Mabel couldn’t get the fog bell mechanism
started, so she grabbed a hammer and manually rang the bell, approximating
its official time sequence for several hours until her parents returned.
One of the
better-known female lightkeepers in U.S. history was Juliet Fish Nichols of
Point Knox Light on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Juliet |
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The fog
bell tower seen at the right here,
at
Perkins Island Light on Maine’s
Kennebec
River, has been
restored
in recent years.
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grew up with
her aunt, Emily Fish, who was the longtime keeper of California’s Point
Pinos Light. Juliet had repeated battles with the Gamewell mechanism
that ran the fog bell at Point Knox. In July 1906, she banged the bell
with a hammer every 15 seconds for at least 20 hours. Two years later
the same thing happened again and she hammered away for several hours.
Juliet Nichols retired as |
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keeper in 1914,
turning over her duties and presumably her trusty hammer to Keeper Peter
Admiral.
In his 1945 book
Famous Lighthouses of New England (available in a new edition as
Lighthouses of New England), the popular New England historian Edward
Rowe Snow wrote about Keeper Thomas L. Chase at Long Point Lighthouse near
Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Today, the Cape Cod Chapter of the
American Lighthouse Foundation cares for this lighthouse. Snow wrote that
the fog bell mechanism broke down in the last week of May 1933, just before
a “pea soup” fog rolled in.
Keeper Chase
rigged the bell so he could ring it by tugging on a rope. Using his watch
to make sure of the timing, Chase proceeded to pull the rope every 30
seconds, sounding the 1,000-pound bell. He kept up the repetitive task from
10:45 p.m. until 8 a.m. the following morning. The fog returned just after
dark. The keeper sounded the bell again until 2 a.m., this time using his
left hand as he rested his sore right arm.
The next day,
Chase rode his makeshift dune buggy into Provincetown and picked up the
needed replacement parts, and managed to fix the |
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mechanism
before the fog returned. He told a friend, “I feel like a baseball
pitcher who has twirled a couple of double-headers without rest,” but
said that he’d tie the rope to his legs if necessary. If it was foggy,
the bell would be sounded – period.
It’s said that
Fannie May Salter, who became keeper at Maryland’s Turkey Point Light in
1925, once saved a large steamer from going aground in the fog by
striking the bell with a hammer every 15 seconds for nearly an hour.
Because she was occupied with this unusual duty, Keeper Salter missed a
phone call from her son-in-law that would have informed her that her new
granddaughter had just been born. Because winding the striking
mechanism was strenuous, in 1928 a laborer was hired at $25 per month |
This diagram on display at Maine’s
Fort Point Lighthouse shows the
workings of a typical fog bell striking apparatus. Winding the
mechanism raised the weights to the top of the
bell tower, and as the weights fell
they drove the hammer that struck
the bell at defined intervals.
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to wind the
machine for Fannie May Salter.
This barely
scratches the surface of the tales of keepers going above and beyond when
fog signal machinery failed. Hammer or rope in hand, the ever-vigilant
keepers proved time and time again they were willing to do whatever it took
in service of safe navigation.
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