Martha’s Vineyard Lighthouses of Nantucket Sound

The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound presents its first ACONS (A Celebration of Nantucket Sound) webinar with a fascinating look at the history of Martha’s Vineyard lighthouses on the shores of Nantucket Sound. Our guest speaker is historian A. Bowdoin "Bow" Van Riper of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
 
Register at: https://tinyurl.com/SOS-MVLighthouses
 
The waters between Cape Cod and the Islands were already a busy shipping lane when the first lighthouse on the south side of the channel—Brant Point Light, at the mouth of Nantucket Harbor—was established in 1746. At the peak of the “Age of Sail” in the mid-19^th century, 40,000-50,000 ships a year transited Nantucket Sound, and more than two dozen lighthouses and lightships helped them navigate it.

This webinar tells the story of three of those lighthouses, built between 1801 and 1879 on the Nantucket Sound shore of Martha's Vineyard: Cape Poge Light, the Island's most-remote and most-moved aid to navigation. Edgartown Harbor Light, built in the early years of the whaling boom, bore witness to the town's evolution. guiding whalers, fishing schooners, and finally yachts up the channel to a safe anchorage. East Chop Light, alone among the Vineyard's beacons, began as a private venture and—once the government took it over—became a testing ground for new technologies. Their stories are threads in the larger story of Martha's Vineyard . . . and of Nantucket Sound.
 
 
About A. Bowdoin Van Riper
A historian for 40 years (so far) "Bow" received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He taught at the college level for more than 20 years and has been Research Librarian at the Martha's Vineyard Museum since 2014. A third-generation washashore, Bow first came to the Island in 1963, at the age of 3 months, and moved there permanently in December 2011. He lives on the shores of Vineyard Haven Harbor in a 19^th century house where, as far as he can tell, nothing of great historical significance ever happened.