“Lighthouse keepers in the 18th and 19th centuries, male and female, faced much danger and performed heavy physical labor,” write Mary and Candace Clifford in their 1993 book Women Who Kept the Lights. “But it was by no means a liberating experience.” “It was a wonderful chapter of women’s history, the way they served in this man’s job,” says DeWire. Some records were destroyed in a fire in the National Archives in the 1920s. “But I would not be presumptuous if I said there were several thousand.” “It was just presumed that women were going to help out whether they were paid or not,” says Elinor DeWire, a historian and the author of more than a dozen books about lighthouses. maritime history, however, she’s not quite so unique-even if it’s hard to pinpoint precisely how many female lighthouse keepers came before her. Of the 70 keepers who have tended to Boston Light since 1716, Snowman is the first and only woman. “That’s probably what I miss the most about the island-that expansiveness, and being close to the water, in the elements, in the fog, in the snow, in the sleet.” The current Boston Light dates to 1783, though the first lighthouse on the site was built in 1716.
Surrounded by trees, unable to see the sun rising or setting, “I feel claustrophobic,” said Snowman, in her profoundly Bostonian accent. Ongoing safety issues as well as COVID-19 had confined her to her home on the mainland, in Weymouth*, and she’d been struggling with cabin fever. Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteer, she became its civilian keeper.īut when we spoke, she was nowhere near the lighthouse. “I stepped out of the dinghy, and I looked up at the lighthouse tower, and I said, ‘Daddy, when I grow up, I want to get married out here.’ And I did, in 1994.” Then, in 2003, after more than three decades as a U.S.
It’s a lifelong love story-at 10, she first visited the island with her father. “When I asked you about past lives,” she said, “I feel as if I’ve done this before, and that I came home.”įor the past 17 years, Snowman has served as the keeper of Boston Light, a centuries-old lighthouse, out on a freckle of treeless land in Boston Harbor, in Massachusetts. I hesitated, and she changed the subject. “Do you believe in past lives?” asked Sally Snowman.
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