April 1, 2020 • 38 mins
Ida Lewis lived most of her life fairly isolated on a tiny island off the coast Rhode Island. But it was a life she deeply loved. In her words, “I could not be contented elsewhere.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Since so
many of us are doing some kind of social distancing
(00:21):
or sheltering in place, and even if you're still needing
to go into work once you're off work, probably living
a more isolated life than you might normally do, I
thought it might be nice to do an episode on
somebody whose life was relatively solitary, and a kind of
winding path on that theme led me to today's topic
of lighthousekeeper Ida Lewis, and she lived most of her
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life on a tiny island off the coast of Rhode Island.
There was one phase in her life when this wasn't
particularly solitary, which of course we will be talking more about,
but this was the life that she deeply loved. In
her words, she said quote, I could not be contented elsewhere.
The lighthouse in what would become the United States was
Boston Lighthouse that was built in seventeen sixteen and supplemented
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with a foghorn three years later. Other lighthouses followed, each
built and managed by one of the colonies. Then, after
the Revolutionary War, the US tried to organize itself into
a nation with a functioning government, ultimately ratifying the U.
S Constitution in seventeen and this lay the groundwork for
the first U. S. Congress, which met starting in seventeen
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eighty nine. The first Public Works Act that was passed
by this Congress included the establishment of a Bureau of
Lighthouses under the Department of the Treasury. This act brought
all of the lighthouses in the US under the control
of the federal government. The federal government also decided where
to build new lighthouses and appointed keepers to manage and
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maintain those lighthouses. The officially appointed lighthouse keepers were generally men.
Most lighthouses at the time were oil burning lamps with
lenses or reflectors to focus the light. They were critical
parts of the maritime navigation system, and keeping them going
could be an all night job. The keeper needed to
light the lamp, keep the wick properly trimmed, and ensure
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that it stayed burning throughout the night before extinguishing it
in the morning. The lenses or reflectors also had to
be frequently cleaned and polished to remove soot. Another residue
to keep the light as bright as possible, and of
course the lighthouse keeper needed things like food and clean
clothes to do this work. Most lighthouses were in relatively
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remote locations, so bringing in additional labor to help with
all this stuff was not an easy task, and a
lot of the time there also wasn't a budget to
pay for more help, so tending a lighthouse tended to
be a family affair. Sometimes the keeper's family, including his
wife or daughters, helped with the actual running and maintenance
of the light, including keeping it going if the keeper
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had to be away, but the rest to the family
also carried out a lot of other labor that made
it possible for the keeper to keep tending the light,
things like cleaning and preparing food and doing laundry, and
keeping records and getting supplies and on and on. It
was also a common practice for a lighthousekeeper's widow or
possibly a daughter, to take over for him if he died.
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In many cases, everyone involved thought this was the best
possible outcome, and it was so common that both keepers
and the government basically took it for granted. The lightkeeper's
family continued to do work that they already knew how
to do, and they kept collecting the late keeper's pay,
and the government got to keep the lighthouse running without
going through the effort and expense of finding a new keeper. Plus,
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if the keeper's widow or daughter was the person who
was keeping the light going, she was not doing it
with a formal appointment as lighthousekeeper. In most cases, that
meant that she got to earn that paycheck as long
as she was doing the work, but she was not
entitled to a pen shin at the end of that service.
So although lighthouse keepers tended to be men, a lot
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of women actually did this job. There were at least
one forty five women who are documented as keeping lighthouses
from the time the lights came under federal control until
nineteen forty seven, at which point all the remaining lighthouses
had been automated. At least twice that many were assistant keepers.
The light that Ida Lewis kept is on what was
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then called Lime Rock, off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island.
Newport had been a major port during the Transatlantic slave trade.
It was one of the North American ports where the
slave ships departed, and it was also home to more
than twenty distilleries that made rum from sugar and molasses
that were grown and processed by enslaved people in the Caribbean.
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When the War of eighteen twelve disrupted all of this,
Newport sort of reinvented itself, mainly as a vacation destination.
Idawally's or Radia Lewis, was born in Newport on February
forty two. Her father, Captain jose A. Lewis, was a
cutter pilot, although he had to retire because of his health.
(05:10):
But then in eighteen fifty three, Congress ordered the construction
of Lime Rock Lighthouse in there aganst At Bay. This
was shortly after the US had established a new Lighthouse
Board to oversee and manage all of the nation's lighthouses.
The Lime Rock Lighthouse was an oil burning lantern with
the Fraynell lens, which can be pronounced in about ten
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different ways, including fresnel and frenelle. French physicist Augustine Frenelle
developed this lens in eighteen twenty two, and soon they
were standard in lighthouses. Frenelle lens looks kind of like
a beehive made out of bulls eyes that surrounds the
light source, and and it focuses the light that the
source emits into a very narrow beam. The first keeper
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of Lime Rock Lighthouse was Joseph Lewis, who was Captain
Lewis's son from a prior marriage. He only stayed in
that role for a few months, though, and Captain Lewis
was appointed as his successor. Lime Rock itself was only
about two hundred twenty yards from the shore at the
closest point, but it was about a mile and a
half away from Newport, and at first the lighthouse was
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the only structure on this little island. The keeper was
expected to row back and forth to the shore every day.
It really quickly became clear that this was not always
possible because of bad weather or nautical conditions, so a
shack was built to serve as a temporary shelter if
the keeper needed it. A permanent dwelling was completed on
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Lime Rock in eighteen fifty seven. When the permanent dwelling
was finished, the captain moved his family out from Newport
to the island. They arrived there on June fifty seven.
This included his wife's radia and four surviving children. There
were two sons jose A known as Hosey, and Thomas
Rudolph who went by Rudolph or Rude, and two dogs,
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Nurse Ida and Hattie. Ida was fifteen years old and
the oldest of the surviving four. Only about four months
after the family moved to Lime Rock, Captain Lewis had
a severe stroke and he was disabled for the rest
of his life. Ida and Zeradia took over keeping the lighthouse.
Ida was already really familiar with the lighthouses working. She
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had been making the trip to the island with her
father before the lighthousekeeper's residence was finished. Soon Ida was
doing most of the work involved with tending the light.
She would tend the light overnight, rowe her siblings to
shore for school in the morning, go home and sleep,
and then returned to shore to bring the younger children
home after school, before helping with all the domestic tasks
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around the house, and she also helped to take care
of her sister, Hattie, who was chronically ill. Ida's own
formal education ended when the family moved to Lime Rock,
but she became highly skilled at all the work that
needed to be done at the lighthouse. She also became
him a really strong swimmer, and an expert at handling
a skiff on the treacherous waters around the lighthouse. Her
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father described watching her bring her siblings home in terrible weather, saying, quote,
expecting any moment to see them swamped, and the crew
at the mercy of the waves. And then I've turned
away and said to my wife, let me know when
they get safe ends, for I could not endure to
see them perish and realized that we were powerless to
save them. But Ida always got her siblings home without incident,
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and she also rescued a lot of other people. And
we're going to talk about that in a moment after
we first paused for a sponsor break. When Ida Lewis
was living, a lighthousekeeper's primary duty was to keep the
lighthouse going, but lighthousekeepers could also be called on to
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rescue people who were in danger in the water nearby,
and that was something that Ida Lewis did a lot.
Her first documented rescue was on September four, a little
more than a year after she and her family moved
to the lighthousekeeper's residence on the island. That day, four
teenage boys were traveling around the bay by sailboat. They
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had gone past the lighthouse for a picnic on an
island farther out in the bay. On the way back,
the four of them were horsing around when one decided
it would be a good idea to climb the boat mast.
This caused them to capsize, something that Ida witnessed from
the island. Ida immediately got into her skiff, rode out
to them, pulled each of them into the skiff with her,
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and then took them all back to the lighthouse. One
of the four boys had lost consciousness in all this
and had to be revived, but all of them ultimately
survived this ordeal. Uh. No horseplay on the sailboat is
the moral of that story. I feel like we shouldn't
have to tell you this. We can go back in
time and chastise those boys when we build our time machine. Uh.
(10:00):
Many of Louis's other rescues were a soldiers stationed at
Fort Adams. Fort Adams had started as a basic fortification
at the end of the eighteenth century. It grew and
evolved with ongoing construction of a fort happening between eighteen
twenty four and eighteen fifty seven. Newport, of course, was
a popular place for soldiers at Fort Adams to go
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for recreation and entertainment. While you could make that whole
trip over land if you wanted to, it was much
faster and much more direct to just go by water.
It was like you had to go to the south
and then turn east and go that way for a while,
and then go north even farther than where you started.
You could just go in an almost straight line in
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the water. So Lime Rock White House was situated roughly
between Fort Adams and Newport by water, very roughly. So.
A lot of the people that Lewis was rescuing were soldiers,
and a lot of them were on their way back
from amusing themselves in report. Often they were not particularly
sober or clearheaded when they got into trouble. Lewis's first
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rescue of some inebriated soldiers was in February of eighteen
sixty six. Three men were making their way back to
Fort Adams in a stolen boat coincidentally, a stolen boat
that belonged to Ida's brother. On the way across the water.
For unknown reasons, one of the men decided to stand up,
and in the process he put his foot through the
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bottom of the boat. The boat immediately started taking on water,
and the man's two companions either jumped or fell overboard.
Lewis again wrote out in her skiff. Once she got there,
she had to haul this one soldier into the skiff
by force. She heard her back in the process. Because
this man was both drunk and starting to suffer from hypothermia,
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so he was basically deadweight, he couldn't help her at all.
She also had to keep pulling on him until his
foot came free from her brother's stolen boat. Once she
got him aboard, she rode him back to the lighthouse
and loaned him a dry set of clothes. It's not
entirely clear what happened to the other two soldiers who
had been in Lewis's brothers stolen boat. It is possible
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that they drowned after jumping or falling into the water.
If they made it back to shore, they went a
wall from Fort Adams. The man that she rescued never
returned that change of clothes he had been given at
the lighthouse. The following January, three men tried to rescue
a sheep that belonged to August Belmont, who was a
German born banker and diplomat who was the patriarch of
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one of Newport's wealthiest and most prominent families. This sheep
had jumped off a wharf, and the three men stole
a skiff to try to go after it. This was
once again Ida's brother's skiff, the one that he had
actually bought to replace the one that the sailor put
his foot through a year earlier. This was not a
simple case of bad luck. When he was on shore,
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he tied his skiff up at Jones Wharf, which point
did almost directly at Lime Rock, so anybody who stole
it and then got in trouble was probably going to
be in a good spot for Ida to see what
had happened and come to their rescue. This effort to
rescue the sheep was ill advised, though there was a
gale going on and the boat quickly started to founder.
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Ida went after the three men, and once she had
all of them ashore, they begged her to please go
save the sheep too, so she went back for it.
Realizing there was no possible way to get a struggling
water log sheep into her skiff, she tied it to
the skiff and rode back to shore, hauling it alongside her.
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Not long after that, Lewis rescued a man whose sailboat
had struck a rock in the bay. This was a
rock that was submerged at high tide, but hazardous at
low tide, and locals new to avoid it. But the
man in the boat either missed the marker that was
on the rock or just didn't really know what it meant,
so he struck this rock in the middle of the night.
Visibility was too low at that point for anybody from
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the lighthouse to be able to see him. Ida's mother
spotted the barely visible tip of the mast of this boat.
In the morning, Ida found the man clinging to the
side of the damaged boat. She got him again back
to the lighthouse and treated him for hypothermia. Apparently this
boat was also stolen, and the boat's owner later wrote
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to Ida saying that he would have paid her fifty
dollars if she had just let the culprit drown. It
does seem like there was a whole lot of boat
theft happening in and around Newport. In the casual boat
taking on March twenty nine of eighteen sixty nine, at
the age of twenty seven, Ida Lewis carried out her
most dramatic and dangerous rescue, also her most famous. Sergeant
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James Adams and Private John McLachlin were returning to Fort
Adams from Newport during a snowstorm. They had hired a
fourteen year old boy to act as their pilot on
this little journey. This was something he apparently told them
he was totally confident he could do. But they're boat
capsized and the teenager drowned. Louis was sick with a
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cold that day, but her mother saw what happened through
the window and called out to her. Louis ran out
of the house without stopping to put her coat or
boots on, and her younger brother Joseah went with her.
She rode out to the men and she managed to
pull them into the skiff before rowing them back to
the lighthouse to warm up and wait out the storm.
This time, Ida herself had to recover from both hypothermia
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and frost bitten feet. This rescue really made Ida Louis famous.
People called her the Grace Darling of America. Grace Darling
was the daughter of William Darling, keeper of Longstone Lighthouse
off the coast of Northumberland. Grace had helped her father
rescue nine survivors of a shipwreck on September seven, eight
thirty eight. Grace Darling became really famous for this. She
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was depicted an artwork and sheet music was printed of
musical compositions that were written in her honor. Queen Victoria
also wrote her a personal letter along the same lines.
People wrote and printed sheet music for Ida Lewis, and
they depicted her rescue in artwork, some of which visibly
resembled the depictions of Grace Darling. In another similarity, President
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Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Schuyler Colfax each visited
Louis in eighteen sixty nine. There's a story about this
visit with Grant. It's that Grant road out to the
lighthouse and then got his feet wet while he was
trying to get out of his boat, but said, quote,
I've come to see Ida Lewis, and to see her,
I'd get wet up to my armpits if necessary. That
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is a charming story, but in reality, it seems like
she met the President while he was in Newport, and
she was the one who went into Newport to meet him.
The city of Newport renamed the fourth of July eighteen
sixty nine as Ida Lewis Day, girls wore scarves with
Ida's name on them, tied in the way she often
wore her own. Money was raised by subscription and to
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build her a very fancy and completely impractical rowboat, which
was called the Rescue. It was made of mahogany, with
velvet cushions, gilt edges, and rock copper fastenings. The New
York Times described it as a quote beautiful and costly boat,
and it was paraded around the streets of Newport before
it was presented to her. Since Louis also needed a
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place to store this very impractical boat, financier James Fisk
built her a boat house for it. He also gave
her a set of gold plated oar locks. The people
of Newport also gave her various banners and flags and
other adornments for the Rescue. Meanwhile, Louis kept her own
much more practical skiff, which was the Courageous Child of Columbia,
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for her everyday use. On July one, eighteen sixty nine,
Louis was on the cover of Harper's Weekly, with the
publication calling her the heroine of Newport. She was written
up in other publications as well, and she was frequently
stographed both in studios and around Lime Rock. Also in
eighteen sixty nine, the Cihosis Society, a professional women's organization,
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made her an honorary member. The Life Saving Benevolent Association
also awarded her it's Silver Medal in recognition for the
rescue of the two soldiers. Apart from all these honors
and awards, there was kind of a media frenzy, and
for a while Louis's fame intruded upon her regular life
at the lighthouse. Visitors and well wishers rode out to
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Lime Rock to try to meet her by her father's couch.
She got as many as nine thousand visitors to the
island in the summer of eighteen sixty nine alone. This
included Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton when they
were in Newport for a convention at Newport's Academy of Music.
Some of these visitors were not particularly polite. Sometimes they
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would pretend to be in trouble at sea, trying to
get Ida to rescue them. Other stole clippings, cart vizite,
and other momentos that she had at the lighthouse. Lewis
also didn't particularly enjoy all this attention and tried to
stay out of the spotlight. When Newport had presented her
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with the rescue, she got Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson to
thank the donors and the citizens of Newport on her behalf.
He also relayed a message from her in this address
that she saw this work only as her duty and
as an act of providence that she was even able
to carry it out at all. She did allow Colonel
George Douglas Brewerton to write a biography of her in
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eight teen s exty nine, possibly because she was hoping
that if there was a book out there about her,
people would stop asking her so many questions. Brewerton noted
that her ability to carry out these rescues seemed at
odds with who she was, a five foot for slender
woman who was mostly photographed in feminine dresses. In the biography,
he wrote, quote, it seems only wonderful that a slight
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formed woman should have formed strength to lift this huge
lump masculine in a briety. Other publications lingered on the
question of whether it was unfeminine of her to do
all of this but Louis herself was reported as saying,
quote anyone who thinks it is unfeminine to save lives
as the brains of a donkey. This attension on her
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continued beyond eighteen sixty nine. For example, in August six
of eighteen seventy, the satirical magazine Punchinello published a comedic
article about somebody going to Newport hoping to be rescued
by the one and only Ida Lewis. In addition to
piles of fan mail and all of those thousands of visitors,
Ida Lewis also got numerous marriage proposals, and on October
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seventy she did marry to Captain William Wilson of black Rock, Connecticut.
They were married at Newport Methodist Episcopalian Church. Lewis left
the lighthouse in the care of her mother and brothers
and moved to black Rock with her new husband. We'll
talk about how that worked out after a break. We
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know very little about Ida Louis's marriage to William Wilson.
We can speculate, but I can think of a few reasons,
but we don't really know anything about their feelings for
one another or what motivated Louis to get married and
leave Lime Rock, but within about two years they had separated.
They never formally divorced, though, probably because Louis thought that
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divorce was sinful. She continued to use her married name
and at least some contexts for the rest of her life.
We also don't know exactly what prompted Louis to go
back to Lime Rock around eight seventy two. Although her
father died on November seven of that year, her mother technically,
though not officially, took over as keeper. Although once Ida
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was back on the island, she was the one who
was doing most of that work. After a while of
basically keeping the lighthouse herself, Ida started to become frustrate
with her lack of formal appointment as a lighthousekeeper. With
the exception of her time in Connecticut, she'd been doing
most of the work involved with keeping the lighthouse and
maintaining the light, as well as a lot of the
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domestic work. She'd been doing that for well over a decade.
In November eighteen seventy seven, Lewis made another dramatic rescue
when she went after three inebriated soldiers from Fort Adams.
This was during another snowstorm and it was difficult, cold,
and wet enough that she and others around her blamed
it for contributing to a serious illness afterward, something that
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may have really been diptheria. By this point, Louis's many rescues,
especially rescues of soldiers, were well known within the federal government.
In eighteen seventy eight, General Ambrose Everett Burnside, who was
former governor of Rhode Island and at the time of
u S Senator, started investigating why she had never been
given a formal appointment. Finally, on January twenty one, eighteen
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seventy nine, Ida Lewis was formally appointed as a lighthouse keeper.
She received a letter from John Sherman, Secretary of the Treasury,
which read quote, you are hereby appointed keeper of the
lighthouse at Lime Rock, Rhode Island, at a salary of
seven hundred fifty dollars per annum. Vice Miss Zaradia Lewis resigned.
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This appointment is conferred upon you as a mark of
my appreciation for your noble and heroic efforts saving human lives.
This seven hundred fifty dollar salary made her the highest
paid lighthouse keeper in the United States, and, according to
many articles. She was also the first woman to get
this kind of formal appointment. That second distinction isn't completely clear,
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though various women had had some kind of formal recognition
as a lighthouse keeper before this. As we mentioned earlier
in the show, hundreds of women did this work. Exactly
who should be called first not entirely clear. On February
four one, Lewis made yet another rescue of inebriated soldiers
from Fort Adam. This time, though they had been on foot,
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they were trying to cross the frozen harbor. As was
the case with the boat that struck the rock earlier
in the episode, locals had a pretty good sense of
which part of the frozen harbor were safe to walk
on and which we're not. But these two men either
didn't know, didn't care, or were just too intoxicated to
realize that they had strayed into dangerous territory. This time.
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I think it was her mother who saw them to
go through the ice um, but again without a coat
on and while wearing a bustle gown. Ida Louis went
after these men on the ice. She tried to throw
them a clothes line so she could pull them back
to safety. She made several attempts that didn't quite work,
where she would throw the line and they wouldn't be
able to grab it. One of the men finally grabbed
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onto the line and yanked on it in his panic,
and in doing this he pulled Louis herself through the ice,
but she managed to pull herself and her bustle gown
back to safety before trying yet again. She maned to
get one of the two men out of the water
before her brother arrived on the scene and helped the other.
I can't help but thinking if I were in her
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position at this point, I'd be like, you're on your own, mout.
I think if I were in her position at this point,
I might have drowned. I cannot imagine how heavy a
wet bustle gown is. Yeah, it depends on what kind
of cage crineline she had um. At some point after
this rescue, someone asked Lewis what had given her the
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strength to do this. She answered, quote, I don't know.
I ain't particularly strong. The Lord Almighty gives it to
me when I need it, that's all. This one rescue
sparked a second wave of fame for Idle Lewis, although
maybe not quite as dramatic as the earlier one. On
October eleventh of that year, she was awarded the US
Government's Life Saving Medal of the First Class. This medal
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had been established by an Act of Congress in eighteen
seventy four, and Lewis was the first woman to receive it.
The Life Saving Services eighteen eighty one annual report described
her as having quote unquestionable nerve, presence of mind, and
dashing courage. On November five, eighty one, Lewis was also
written up in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper. Louis continued on
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with her work at the lighthouse. Her brother Hosey died
in eighty three, and her sister Hattie died the next year.
They both had tuberculosis. Ida's mother rarely left her bed
after their deaths Ida had always been Christian, but after
her siblings died, she became truly devout, joining the church
she had been married in and being baptized there on June.
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She also started attending services daily. At the height of
Louis's earlier fame, the island had seen hundreds of visitors
a month, but by the eighteen eighties, Lime Rock was
a solitary place. Again, Ida and her mother did not
get many visitors, and after Zaradia died in eighteen eighty seven,
Ida was mostly alone as she got older. Her brother
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Adolf helped her tend the light, but Ida loved it
on the island. In her words, quote, there's a piece
on this rock that you don't find on shore. There
are hundreds of boats going in and out of this harbor.
It's part of my happiness to know they are depending
on me to guide them to safety. In eight six,
lighthouse keepers in the US were classified as civil servants
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as part of ongoing civil service reform. Ten years later,
Louis carried out her last documented rescue. A friend came
to visit her and capsized her boat just shy of
the island stock. Louis's friend, Cornelia Chadwick, tried to use
this rescue to get Louis a pension through Andrew Carnegie's
Hero Fund. This is the fund that recognized acts of
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heroism that had happened after the fund was established in
nineteen o four. For her part, Louis didn't think pulling
her friend out of the water right by the lighthouse
really counted as a rescue, but it seemed that Carnegie
was moved by all of Louis's earlier acts of heroism.
In tino six, he decided to give her a thirty
dollar a month pension out of his own pocket, which
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Ida put into a bank account for her brother to
leave to him after her death. Also in nineteen o six,
an Act of Congress established the American Cross of Honor.
Louis became the first person to receive it. In nineteen
o seven, old Lewis was still being recognized for her work.
The job of lighthouse keeper was dramatically changing. It had
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been a job that was mostly about keeping and maintaining
a lighthouse and sometimes rescuing people, but it started to
involve more and more administrative work. There were more forms
and more procedures, and more records to be kept. Basically
just a lot more bureaucracy, and none of those things
were really Lewis's strengths. There was also an increasing focus
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on automation and efficiency, and Lewis became concerned that this
trend was going to put her out of a job
and separate her from a light that she described almost
as her own child. In nineteen eleven. Ida Lewis, age
sixty nine, was still tending the light on Lime Rock
with her brother Rudolph's help. In late October of that year,
he arrived one morning and he found her on the
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floor of her bedroom, where she had probably had a stroke.
She never regained consciousness, and she died on October nineteen eleven.
Some of her friends and relatives attributed her sudden death
to stress brought on by all the changes to the
lighthouse administration and her fears about her own future in it.
During her life, she had saved at least eighteen people
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from drowning, the actual number may have been more than
twenty five. Flags were flown at half staff and bells
were told all over Newport in Louis's honor. On the
day of her funeral, six soldiers from Fort Adams served
as pall bearers. A new lighthouse keeper, Ever Jensen, was
chosen as Lewis's successor. He moved into the keeper's residence
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with his wife, and not long after they had a
baby daughter, who they named Ida Lewis Jansen. After her death,
Lewis's friend, Cornelia Chadwick, circulated a letter that she had
gotten from Andrew Carnegie that read, in part quote your
kind note gives me one source of satisfaction, A happy
and favored man. Am I to be enabled to help
such heroines as Ida Lewis, who has passed away. She
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had no future to fear, having made the best of
this life. Fortunate she was, and having you as a friend,
let us try to emulate her in the service of
our fellows. In nineteen twenty four, Lime Rock was renamed
Ida Lewis Rock in the Lighthouse Service changed the name
of the lighthouse to Ida Lewis Lighthouse, even though the
(30:38):
policy was to name lighthouses only after geographical features. The
lighthouse that Lewis had tended was deactivated in July of
ninety seven and replaced with an automated light on a
steel tower, and then its function as a lighthouse ended
in nineteen sixty three. Yeah. I don't know if that
lighthouse renaming was tech chnically okay because the rock had
(31:01):
been renamed after her, or if they were just like,
you know what, forget that whole standard, We're going to
do it this way. By the time the lighthouse stopped operating,
the island itself had been sold many years earlier. The
Ida Lewis Yacht Club bought it in ninety eight and
built a board walk between it and the mainland. As
we said earlier, it wasn't that far to the nearest point.
(31:24):
The yacht club formally opened on the island on July four, nine,
sixty years after Newport had celebrated Ida Lewis Day. In
nine seven, the Coast Guard unveiled a new Keeper class
of bully tenders, with the first of fourteen ships of
that class, named the Ida Lewis. The Ida Lewis was
commissioned on April twelfth, nine and a station from Newport.
(31:49):
The crew of the Ida Lewis also paid for the
restoration of Lewis's headstone at the Common Burial Ground in Newport. Today,
her boat The Rescue is in the collection of the
museum at Fort Adams. I tried to look into whether
this museum is still a place that can be visited.
That's a little hard to determine, giving the fact that
(32:09):
everything is closed right now. You definitely cannot visit it
right now when we're recorded, sure can't. On February seventeen,
Ida Louis was honored with a Google Doodle for her
hundred and seventy fifth birthday, and in eighteen a road
was named in her honor at Arlington National Cemetery, making
(32:29):
her the first woman to be so honored. I also
thought that we would end on a quote from her
which I particularly love and which I also feel like
is appropriate given the time that we're living in right now.
She said, quote, if there were some people out there
who needed my help, I would get into my boat
and go to them, even if I knew I couldn't
get back, wouldn't you? Uh? And I'd also liked if
(32:53):
you would like to know more about her, you can
read a book called lighthouse Keeper's Daughter. The remarkable true
story of Harold in Ida Lewis is one of the
sources for this episode. UM, do you also have some
listener mail for us? By just a totally delightful coincidence,
Tiffany left this note on our Facebook wall yesterday. Tiffany says, so,
(33:18):
I just recently listened to the Flannon Aisles Lighthouse podcast.
I'm that person that has to listen from the beginning
and cannot skip ahead. Anyways, Tracy mentioned that she would
like the lighthouse job. Does working from home make you
feel like you're working at the lighthouse and secondly, are
you enjoying it as much as you thought you would? Anyways,
stay healthy and I'll continue to listen. Maybe I'll catch
(33:39):
up in a year or two. Um. Thank you so much,
Tiffany for this fortuitously coincidentally, very well timed question. Um So,
uh we talked as is I think the only other
episode that we've done that's really about a lighthouse. Um,
because when I landed on this idea for an episode,
I was sort of just making sure we had not
(33:59):
done thinks super duper similar. And I remember saying, uh
in that episode that I felt like I would really
like being a lighthousekeeper. Uh. I think when that episode
came out, I don't think I was married yet. I'm
not even sure. I must have been at least dating
(34:21):
my husband by that point. Um. But I have actually
been working from home on this podcast since. And I
also have always been a pretty introverted person, and so
long before the current pandemic, I would sort of reach
(34:42):
a point in a week where I would kind of think,
to myself, when is the last time that I went outside?
Perhaps I should go outside today. Vitamin D is good
for you. Um. So, in a very strange way the
current Um. I don't think we have escalated to a
shelter in place you're in Massachusetts yet, but the governor
did issue a stay at home directive. Um, and it
(35:05):
weirdly does not feel that much different from my typical
day to day life except my husband is with me.
That's not like it was before. UM. So yeah, it's
it's a very strange thing where I know a lot
of folks who are a lot more social and a
lot more extroverted than I am, who have really been
struggling with the staying at home where I have been
(35:27):
sort of like, yes, this this steels um in terms
of my day to day workplace functioning, it feels a
lot like normal. Um. So thanks Tiffany for this question.
It just it delights me so much that it happens
to be asked right before we were going to record
an episode about a lighthousekeeper. For reference, that episode originally
came out in August of Okay, Patrick and I were dating, Yeah,
(35:51):
I had not moved in with him. No, so you
were still living alone and had been for a while.
So yeah, I, Um, I'm telling you, I thought I
was gonna go bananas having to stay home and I
love it. Um part of me almost thinks I caused
(36:12):
this by all the times that I said as I
left the house, I wish I could stay home with
you and the cats, And now I get to stay
on with Brian and the cats, and it's um uh pandemic.
Aside which I certainly have concerns about, it's pretty great.
I love it. I love getting all this time with
Brian and my house. And also I think because I
have been traveling so much in the last year, Yeah,
(36:34):
I'm like, what do you mean there's no trip on
my calendar. It's pretty great. Yeah. For the context for
listeners who who may not know your your job has
evolved to include executive producing a lot of other shows,
and that has involved a lot, a lot of travel. Yeah,
a lot, a lot, a lot of Like there's the
travel that you and I do together for the show,
(36:54):
and then there's this whole world of other travel. It
is very common for me to uh finished writing whatever
that week's show is on Monday. I basically spend all
day working on that. We record on Tuesday morning, and
then I run right to the airport and that's been
late and then I get home either on like Saturday
or Sunday, and that's been the way my weeks have
(37:14):
been playing out for a while. So like to be
able to just sit here with none of that on
the horizon is feels like an incredible gift because I
really missed my home and my husband and my fuzzy
babies up And I'll just reiterate a thing that we
said in Monday, like we we both feel incredibly fortunate
(37:35):
to be in in a state where it and in
terms of our home, daily lives, lives feels like manageable
and safe. So anyway, thank you again for asking me
about the Flanton Aisles lighthouse comment that I made back
in a very different world than we're feeling like. Run
right now if you like to write to us about
(37:56):
this or any other podcast or a history podcast that
I heart radio dot com and then we are all
over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, the I heart
Radio app anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you
(38:17):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Since so
many of us are doing some kind of social distancing
(00:21):
or sheltering in place, and even if you're still needing
to go into work once you're off work, probably living
a more isolated life than you might normally do, I
thought it might be nice to do an episode on
somebody whose life was relatively solitary, and a kind of
winding path on that theme led me to today's topic
of lighthousekeeper Ida Lewis, and she lived most of her
(00:44):
life on a tiny island off the coast of Rhode Island.
There was one phase in her life when this wasn't
particularly solitary, which of course we will be talking more about,
but this was the life that she deeply loved. In
her words, she said quote, I could not be contented elsewhere.
The lighthouse in what would become the United States was
Boston Lighthouse that was built in seventeen sixteen and supplemented
(01:07):
with a foghorn three years later. Other lighthouses followed, each
built and managed by one of the colonies. Then, after
the Revolutionary War, the US tried to organize itself into
a nation with a functioning government, ultimately ratifying the U.
S Constitution in seventeen and this lay the groundwork for
the first U. S. Congress, which met starting in seventeen
(01:30):
eighty nine. The first Public Works Act that was passed
by this Congress included the establishment of a Bureau of
Lighthouses under the Department of the Treasury. This act brought
all of the lighthouses in the US under the control
of the federal government. The federal government also decided where
to build new lighthouses and appointed keepers to manage and
(01:51):
maintain those lighthouses. The officially appointed lighthouse keepers were generally men.
Most lighthouses at the time were oil burning lamps with
lenses or reflectors to focus the light. They were critical
parts of the maritime navigation system, and keeping them going
could be an all night job. The keeper needed to
light the lamp, keep the wick properly trimmed, and ensure
(02:14):
that it stayed burning throughout the night before extinguishing it
in the morning. The lenses or reflectors also had to
be frequently cleaned and polished to remove soot. Another residue
to keep the light as bright as possible, and of
course the lighthouse keeper needed things like food and clean
clothes to do this work. Most lighthouses were in relatively
(02:36):
remote locations, so bringing in additional labor to help with
all this stuff was not an easy task, and a
lot of the time there also wasn't a budget to
pay for more help, so tending a lighthouse tended to
be a family affair. Sometimes the keeper's family, including his
wife or daughters, helped with the actual running and maintenance
of the light, including keeping it going if the keeper
(02:58):
had to be away, but the rest to the family
also carried out a lot of other labor that made
it possible for the keeper to keep tending the light,
things like cleaning and preparing food and doing laundry, and
keeping records and getting supplies and on and on. It
was also a common practice for a lighthousekeeper's widow or
possibly a daughter, to take over for him if he died.
(03:20):
In many cases, everyone involved thought this was the best
possible outcome, and it was so common that both keepers
and the government basically took it for granted. The lightkeeper's
family continued to do work that they already knew how
to do, and they kept collecting the late keeper's pay,
and the government got to keep the lighthouse running without
going through the effort and expense of finding a new keeper. Plus,
(03:44):
if the keeper's widow or daughter was the person who
was keeping the light going, she was not doing it
with a formal appointment as lighthousekeeper. In most cases, that
meant that she got to earn that paycheck as long
as she was doing the work, but she was not
entitled to a pen shin at the end of that service.
So although lighthouse keepers tended to be men, a lot
(04:05):
of women actually did this job. There were at least
one forty five women who are documented as keeping lighthouses
from the time the lights came under federal control until
nineteen forty seven, at which point all the remaining lighthouses
had been automated. At least twice that many were assistant keepers.
The light that Ida Lewis kept is on what was
(04:28):
then called Lime Rock, off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island.
Newport had been a major port during the Transatlantic slave trade.
It was one of the North American ports where the
slave ships departed, and it was also home to more
than twenty distilleries that made rum from sugar and molasses
that were grown and processed by enslaved people in the Caribbean.
(04:49):
When the War of eighteen twelve disrupted all of this,
Newport sort of reinvented itself, mainly as a vacation destination.
Idawally's or Radia Lewis, was born in Newport on February
forty two. Her father, Captain jose A. Lewis, was a
cutter pilot, although he had to retire because of his health.
(05:10):
But then in eighteen fifty three, Congress ordered the construction
of Lime Rock Lighthouse in there aganst At Bay. This
was shortly after the US had established a new Lighthouse
Board to oversee and manage all of the nation's lighthouses.
The Lime Rock Lighthouse was an oil burning lantern with
the Fraynell lens, which can be pronounced in about ten
(05:31):
different ways, including fresnel and frenelle. French physicist Augustine Frenelle
developed this lens in eighteen twenty two, and soon they
were standard in lighthouses. Frenelle lens looks kind of like
a beehive made out of bulls eyes that surrounds the
light source, and and it focuses the light that the
source emits into a very narrow beam. The first keeper
(05:53):
of Lime Rock Lighthouse was Joseph Lewis, who was Captain
Lewis's son from a prior marriage. He only stayed in
that role for a few months, though, and Captain Lewis
was appointed as his successor. Lime Rock itself was only
about two hundred twenty yards from the shore at the
closest point, but it was about a mile and a
half away from Newport, and at first the lighthouse was
(06:15):
the only structure on this little island. The keeper was
expected to row back and forth to the shore every day.
It really quickly became clear that this was not always
possible because of bad weather or nautical conditions, so a
shack was built to serve as a temporary shelter if
the keeper needed it. A permanent dwelling was completed on
(06:36):
Lime Rock in eighteen fifty seven. When the permanent dwelling
was finished, the captain moved his family out from Newport
to the island. They arrived there on June fifty seven.
This included his wife's radia and four surviving children. There
were two sons jose A known as Hosey, and Thomas
Rudolph who went by Rudolph or Rude, and two dogs,
(07:00):
Nurse Ida and Hattie. Ida was fifteen years old and
the oldest of the surviving four. Only about four months
after the family moved to Lime Rock, Captain Lewis had
a severe stroke and he was disabled for the rest
of his life. Ida and Zeradia took over keeping the lighthouse.
Ida was already really familiar with the lighthouses working. She
(07:21):
had been making the trip to the island with her
father before the lighthousekeeper's residence was finished. Soon Ida was
doing most of the work involved with tending the light.
She would tend the light overnight, rowe her siblings to
shore for school in the morning, go home and sleep,
and then returned to shore to bring the younger children
home after school, before helping with all the domestic tasks
(07:44):
around the house, and she also helped to take care
of her sister, Hattie, who was chronically ill. Ida's own
formal education ended when the family moved to Lime Rock,
but she became highly skilled at all the work that
needed to be done at the lighthouse. She also became
him a really strong swimmer, and an expert at handling
a skiff on the treacherous waters around the lighthouse. Her
(08:07):
father described watching her bring her siblings home in terrible weather, saying, quote,
expecting any moment to see them swamped, and the crew
at the mercy of the waves. And then I've turned
away and said to my wife, let me know when
they get safe ends, for I could not endure to
see them perish and realized that we were powerless to
save them. But Ida always got her siblings home without incident,
(08:31):
and she also rescued a lot of other people. And
we're going to talk about that in a moment after
we first paused for a sponsor break. When Ida Lewis
was living, a lighthousekeeper's primary duty was to keep the
lighthouse going, but lighthousekeepers could also be called on to
(08:53):
rescue people who were in danger in the water nearby,
and that was something that Ida Lewis did a lot.
Her first documented rescue was on September four, a little
more than a year after she and her family moved
to the lighthousekeeper's residence on the island. That day, four
teenage boys were traveling around the bay by sailboat. They
(09:15):
had gone past the lighthouse for a picnic on an
island farther out in the bay. On the way back,
the four of them were horsing around when one decided
it would be a good idea to climb the boat mast.
This caused them to capsize, something that Ida witnessed from
the island. Ida immediately got into her skiff, rode out
to them, pulled each of them into the skiff with her,
(09:38):
and then took them all back to the lighthouse. One
of the four boys had lost consciousness in all this
and had to be revived, but all of them ultimately
survived this ordeal. Uh. No horseplay on the sailboat is
the moral of that story. I feel like we shouldn't
have to tell you this. We can go back in
time and chastise those boys when we build our time machine. Uh.
(10:00):
Many of Louis's other rescues were a soldiers stationed at
Fort Adams. Fort Adams had started as a basic fortification
at the end of the eighteenth century. It grew and
evolved with ongoing construction of a fort happening between eighteen
twenty four and eighteen fifty seven. Newport, of course, was
a popular place for soldiers at Fort Adams to go
(10:22):
for recreation and entertainment. While you could make that whole
trip over land if you wanted to, it was much
faster and much more direct to just go by water.
It was like you had to go to the south
and then turn east and go that way for a while,
and then go north even farther than where you started.
You could just go in an almost straight line in
(10:43):
the water. So Lime Rock White House was situated roughly
between Fort Adams and Newport by water, very roughly. So.
A lot of the people that Lewis was rescuing were soldiers,
and a lot of them were on their way back
from amusing themselves in report. Often they were not particularly
sober or clearheaded when they got into trouble. Lewis's first
(11:07):
rescue of some inebriated soldiers was in February of eighteen
sixty six. Three men were making their way back to
Fort Adams in a stolen boat coincidentally, a stolen boat
that belonged to Ida's brother. On the way across the water.
For unknown reasons, one of the men decided to stand up,
and in the process he put his foot through the
(11:29):
bottom of the boat. The boat immediately started taking on water,
and the man's two companions either jumped or fell overboard.
Lewis again wrote out in her skiff. Once she got there,
she had to haul this one soldier into the skiff
by force. She heard her back in the process. Because
this man was both drunk and starting to suffer from hypothermia,
(11:51):
so he was basically deadweight, he couldn't help her at all.
She also had to keep pulling on him until his
foot came free from her brother's stolen boat. Once she
got him aboard, she rode him back to the lighthouse
and loaned him a dry set of clothes. It's not
entirely clear what happened to the other two soldiers who
had been in Lewis's brothers stolen boat. It is possible
(12:12):
that they drowned after jumping or falling into the water.
If they made it back to shore, they went a
wall from Fort Adams. The man that she rescued never
returned that change of clothes he had been given at
the lighthouse. The following January, three men tried to rescue
a sheep that belonged to August Belmont, who was a
German born banker and diplomat who was the patriarch of
(12:35):
one of Newport's wealthiest and most prominent families. This sheep
had jumped off a wharf, and the three men stole
a skiff to try to go after it. This was
once again Ida's brother's skiff, the one that he had
actually bought to replace the one that the sailor put
his foot through a year earlier. This was not a
simple case of bad luck. When he was on shore,
(12:57):
he tied his skiff up at Jones Wharf, which point
did almost directly at Lime Rock, so anybody who stole
it and then got in trouble was probably going to
be in a good spot for Ida to see what
had happened and come to their rescue. This effort to
rescue the sheep was ill advised, though there was a
gale going on and the boat quickly started to founder.
(13:19):
Ida went after the three men, and once she had
all of them ashore, they begged her to please go
save the sheep too, so she went back for it.
Realizing there was no possible way to get a struggling
water log sheep into her skiff, she tied it to
the skiff and rode back to shore, hauling it alongside her.
(13:39):
Not long after that, Lewis rescued a man whose sailboat
had struck a rock in the bay. This was a
rock that was submerged at high tide, but hazardous at
low tide, and locals new to avoid it. But the
man in the boat either missed the marker that was
on the rock or just didn't really know what it meant,
so he struck this rock in the middle of the night.
Visibility was too low at that point for anybody from
(14:01):
the lighthouse to be able to see him. Ida's mother
spotted the barely visible tip of the mast of this boat.
In the morning, Ida found the man clinging to the
side of the damaged boat. She got him again back
to the lighthouse and treated him for hypothermia. Apparently this
boat was also stolen, and the boat's owner later wrote
(14:23):
to Ida saying that he would have paid her fifty
dollars if she had just let the culprit drown. It
does seem like there was a whole lot of boat
theft happening in and around Newport. In the casual boat
taking on March twenty nine of eighteen sixty nine, at
the age of twenty seven, Ida Lewis carried out her
most dramatic and dangerous rescue, also her most famous. Sergeant
(14:47):
James Adams and Private John McLachlin were returning to Fort
Adams from Newport during a snowstorm. They had hired a
fourteen year old boy to act as their pilot on
this little journey. This was something he apparently told them
he was totally confident he could do. But they're boat
capsized and the teenager drowned. Louis was sick with a
(15:07):
cold that day, but her mother saw what happened through
the window and called out to her. Louis ran out
of the house without stopping to put her coat or
boots on, and her younger brother Joseah went with her.
She rode out to the men and she managed to
pull them into the skiff before rowing them back to
the lighthouse to warm up and wait out the storm.
This time, Ida herself had to recover from both hypothermia
(15:31):
and frost bitten feet. This rescue really made Ida Louis famous.
People called her the Grace Darling of America. Grace Darling
was the daughter of William Darling, keeper of Longstone Lighthouse
off the coast of Northumberland. Grace had helped her father
rescue nine survivors of a shipwreck on September seven, eight
thirty eight. Grace Darling became really famous for this. She
(15:54):
was depicted an artwork and sheet music was printed of
musical compositions that were written in her honor. Queen Victoria
also wrote her a personal letter along the same lines.
People wrote and printed sheet music for Ida Lewis, and
they depicted her rescue in artwork, some of which visibly
resembled the depictions of Grace Darling. In another similarity, President
(16:16):
Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Schuyler Colfax each visited
Louis in eighteen sixty nine. There's a story about this
visit with Grant. It's that Grant road out to the
lighthouse and then got his feet wet while he was
trying to get out of his boat, but said, quote,
I've come to see Ida Lewis, and to see her,
I'd get wet up to my armpits if necessary. That
(16:38):
is a charming story, but in reality, it seems like
she met the President while he was in Newport, and
she was the one who went into Newport to meet him.
The city of Newport renamed the fourth of July eighteen
sixty nine as Ida Lewis Day, girls wore scarves with
Ida's name on them, tied in the way she often
wore her own. Money was raised by subscription and to
(17:00):
build her a very fancy and completely impractical rowboat, which
was called the Rescue. It was made of mahogany, with
velvet cushions, gilt edges, and rock copper fastenings. The New
York Times described it as a quote beautiful and costly boat,
and it was paraded around the streets of Newport before
it was presented to her. Since Louis also needed a
(17:22):
place to store this very impractical boat, financier James Fisk
built her a boat house for it. He also gave
her a set of gold plated oar locks. The people
of Newport also gave her various banners and flags and
other adornments for the Rescue. Meanwhile, Louis kept her own
much more practical skiff, which was the Courageous Child of Columbia,
(17:45):
for her everyday use. On July one, eighteen sixty nine,
Louis was on the cover of Harper's Weekly, with the
publication calling her the heroine of Newport. She was written
up in other publications as well, and she was frequently
stographed both in studios and around Lime Rock. Also in
eighteen sixty nine, the Cihosis Society, a professional women's organization,
(18:09):
made her an honorary member. The Life Saving Benevolent Association
also awarded her it's Silver Medal in recognition for the
rescue of the two soldiers. Apart from all these honors
and awards, there was kind of a media frenzy, and
for a while Louis's fame intruded upon her regular life
at the lighthouse. Visitors and well wishers rode out to
(18:30):
Lime Rock to try to meet her by her father's couch.
She got as many as nine thousand visitors to the
island in the summer of eighteen sixty nine alone. This
included Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton when they
were in Newport for a convention at Newport's Academy of Music.
Some of these visitors were not particularly polite. Sometimes they
(18:51):
would pretend to be in trouble at sea, trying to
get Ida to rescue them. Other stole clippings, cart vizite,
and other momentos that she had at the lighthouse. Lewis
also didn't particularly enjoy all this attention and tried to
stay out of the spotlight. When Newport had presented her
(19:11):
with the rescue, she got Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson to
thank the donors and the citizens of Newport on her behalf.
He also relayed a message from her in this address
that she saw this work only as her duty and
as an act of providence that she was even able
to carry it out at all. She did allow Colonel
George Douglas Brewerton to write a biography of her in
(19:33):
eight teen s exty nine, possibly because she was hoping
that if there was a book out there about her,
people would stop asking her so many questions. Brewerton noted
that her ability to carry out these rescues seemed at
odds with who she was, a five foot for slender
woman who was mostly photographed in feminine dresses. In the biography,
he wrote, quote, it seems only wonderful that a slight
(19:56):
formed woman should have formed strength to lift this huge
lump masculine in a briety. Other publications lingered on the
question of whether it was unfeminine of her to do
all of this but Louis herself was reported as saying,
quote anyone who thinks it is unfeminine to save lives
as the brains of a donkey. This attension on her
(20:16):
continued beyond eighteen sixty nine. For example, in August six
of eighteen seventy, the satirical magazine Punchinello published a comedic
article about somebody going to Newport hoping to be rescued
by the one and only Ida Lewis. In addition to
piles of fan mail and all of those thousands of visitors,
Ida Lewis also got numerous marriage proposals, and on October
(20:41):
seventy she did marry to Captain William Wilson of black Rock, Connecticut.
They were married at Newport Methodist Episcopalian Church. Lewis left
the lighthouse in the care of her mother and brothers
and moved to black Rock with her new husband. We'll
talk about how that worked out after a break. We
(21:07):
know very little about Ida Louis's marriage to William Wilson.
We can speculate, but I can think of a few reasons,
but we don't really know anything about their feelings for
one another or what motivated Louis to get married and
leave Lime Rock, but within about two years they had separated.
They never formally divorced, though, probably because Louis thought that
(21:28):
divorce was sinful. She continued to use her married name
and at least some contexts for the rest of her life.
We also don't know exactly what prompted Louis to go
back to Lime Rock around eight seventy two. Although her
father died on November seven of that year, her mother technically,
though not officially, took over as keeper. Although once Ida
(21:50):
was back on the island, she was the one who
was doing most of that work. After a while of
basically keeping the lighthouse herself, Ida started to become frustrate
with her lack of formal appointment as a lighthousekeeper. With
the exception of her time in Connecticut, she'd been doing
most of the work involved with keeping the lighthouse and
maintaining the light, as well as a lot of the
(22:11):
domestic work. She'd been doing that for well over a decade.
In November eighteen seventy seven, Lewis made another dramatic rescue
when she went after three inebriated soldiers from Fort Adams.
This was during another snowstorm and it was difficult, cold,
and wet enough that she and others around her blamed
it for contributing to a serious illness afterward, something that
(22:35):
may have really been diptheria. By this point, Louis's many rescues,
especially rescues of soldiers, were well known within the federal government.
In eighteen seventy eight, General Ambrose Everett Burnside, who was
former governor of Rhode Island and at the time of
u S Senator, started investigating why she had never been
given a formal appointment. Finally, on January twenty one, eighteen
(22:58):
seventy nine, Ida Lewis was formally appointed as a lighthouse keeper.
She received a letter from John Sherman, Secretary of the Treasury,
which read quote, you are hereby appointed keeper of the
lighthouse at Lime Rock, Rhode Island, at a salary of
seven hundred fifty dollars per annum. Vice Miss Zaradia Lewis resigned.
(23:18):
This appointment is conferred upon you as a mark of
my appreciation for your noble and heroic efforts saving human lives.
This seven hundred fifty dollar salary made her the highest
paid lighthouse keeper in the United States, and, according to
many articles. She was also the first woman to get
this kind of formal appointment. That second distinction isn't completely clear,
(23:40):
though various women had had some kind of formal recognition
as a lighthouse keeper before this. As we mentioned earlier
in the show, hundreds of women did this work. Exactly
who should be called first not entirely clear. On February
four one, Lewis made yet another rescue of inebriated soldiers
from Fort Adam. This time, though they had been on foot,
(24:02):
they were trying to cross the frozen harbor. As was
the case with the boat that struck the rock earlier
in the episode, locals had a pretty good sense of
which part of the frozen harbor were safe to walk
on and which we're not. But these two men either
didn't know, didn't care, or were just too intoxicated to
realize that they had strayed into dangerous territory. This time.
(24:23):
I think it was her mother who saw them to
go through the ice um, but again without a coat
on and while wearing a bustle gown. Ida Louis went
after these men on the ice. She tried to throw
them a clothes line so she could pull them back
to safety. She made several attempts that didn't quite work,
where she would throw the line and they wouldn't be
able to grab it. One of the men finally grabbed
(24:46):
onto the line and yanked on it in his panic,
and in doing this he pulled Louis herself through the ice,
but she managed to pull herself and her bustle gown
back to safety before trying yet again. She maned to
get one of the two men out of the water
before her brother arrived on the scene and helped the other.
I can't help but thinking if I were in her
(25:07):
position at this point, I'd be like, you're on your own, mout.
I think if I were in her position at this point,
I might have drowned. I cannot imagine how heavy a
wet bustle gown is. Yeah, it depends on what kind
of cage crineline she had um. At some point after
this rescue, someone asked Lewis what had given her the
(25:28):
strength to do this. She answered, quote, I don't know.
I ain't particularly strong. The Lord Almighty gives it to
me when I need it, that's all. This one rescue
sparked a second wave of fame for Idle Lewis, although
maybe not quite as dramatic as the earlier one. On
October eleventh of that year, she was awarded the US
Government's Life Saving Medal of the First Class. This medal
(25:51):
had been established by an Act of Congress in eighteen
seventy four, and Lewis was the first woman to receive it.
The Life Saving Services eighteen eighty one annual report described
her as having quote unquestionable nerve, presence of mind, and
dashing courage. On November five, eighty one, Lewis was also
written up in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper. Louis continued on
(26:14):
with her work at the lighthouse. Her brother Hosey died
in eighty three, and her sister Hattie died the next year.
They both had tuberculosis. Ida's mother rarely left her bed
after their deaths Ida had always been Christian, but after
her siblings died, she became truly devout, joining the church
she had been married in and being baptized there on June.
(26:38):
She also started attending services daily. At the height of
Louis's earlier fame, the island had seen hundreds of visitors
a month, but by the eighteen eighties, Lime Rock was
a solitary place. Again, Ida and her mother did not
get many visitors, and after Zaradia died in eighteen eighty seven,
Ida was mostly alone as she got older. Her brother
(27:00):
Adolf helped her tend the light, but Ida loved it
on the island. In her words, quote, there's a piece
on this rock that you don't find on shore. There
are hundreds of boats going in and out of this harbor.
It's part of my happiness to know they are depending
on me to guide them to safety. In eight six,
lighthouse keepers in the US were classified as civil servants
(27:21):
as part of ongoing civil service reform. Ten years later,
Louis carried out her last documented rescue. A friend came
to visit her and capsized her boat just shy of
the island stock. Louis's friend, Cornelia Chadwick, tried to use
this rescue to get Louis a pension through Andrew Carnegie's
Hero Fund. This is the fund that recognized acts of
(27:43):
heroism that had happened after the fund was established in
nineteen o four. For her part, Louis didn't think pulling
her friend out of the water right by the lighthouse
really counted as a rescue, but it seemed that Carnegie
was moved by all of Louis's earlier acts of heroism.
In tino six, he decided to give her a thirty
dollar a month pension out of his own pocket, which
(28:05):
Ida put into a bank account for her brother to
leave to him after her death. Also in nineteen o six,
an Act of Congress established the American Cross of Honor.
Louis became the first person to receive it. In nineteen
o seven, old Lewis was still being recognized for her work.
The job of lighthouse keeper was dramatically changing. It had
(28:25):
been a job that was mostly about keeping and maintaining
a lighthouse and sometimes rescuing people, but it started to
involve more and more administrative work. There were more forms
and more procedures, and more records to be kept. Basically
just a lot more bureaucracy, and none of those things
were really Lewis's strengths. There was also an increasing focus
(28:46):
on automation and efficiency, and Lewis became concerned that this
trend was going to put her out of a job
and separate her from a light that she described almost
as her own child. In nineteen eleven. Ida Lewis, age
sixty nine, was still tending the light on Lime Rock
with her brother Rudolph's help. In late October of that year,
he arrived one morning and he found her on the
(29:08):
floor of her bedroom, where she had probably had a stroke.
She never regained consciousness, and she died on October nineteen eleven.
Some of her friends and relatives attributed her sudden death
to stress brought on by all the changes to the
lighthouse administration and her fears about her own future in it.
During her life, she had saved at least eighteen people
(29:31):
from drowning, the actual number may have been more than
twenty five. Flags were flown at half staff and bells
were told all over Newport in Louis's honor. On the
day of her funeral, six soldiers from Fort Adams served
as pall bearers. A new lighthouse keeper, Ever Jensen, was
chosen as Lewis's successor. He moved into the keeper's residence
(29:53):
with his wife, and not long after they had a
baby daughter, who they named Ida Lewis Jansen. After her death,
Lewis's friend, Cornelia Chadwick, circulated a letter that she had
gotten from Andrew Carnegie that read, in part quote your
kind note gives me one source of satisfaction, A happy
and favored man. Am I to be enabled to help
such heroines as Ida Lewis, who has passed away. She
(30:16):
had no future to fear, having made the best of
this life. Fortunate she was, and having you as a friend,
let us try to emulate her in the service of
our fellows. In nineteen twenty four, Lime Rock was renamed
Ida Lewis Rock in the Lighthouse Service changed the name
of the lighthouse to Ida Lewis Lighthouse, even though the
(30:38):
policy was to name lighthouses only after geographical features. The
lighthouse that Lewis had tended was deactivated in July of
ninety seven and replaced with an automated light on a
steel tower, and then its function as a lighthouse ended
in nineteen sixty three. Yeah. I don't know if that
lighthouse renaming was tech chnically okay because the rock had
(31:01):
been renamed after her, or if they were just like,
you know what, forget that whole standard, We're going to
do it this way. By the time the lighthouse stopped operating,
the island itself had been sold many years earlier. The
Ida Lewis Yacht Club bought it in ninety eight and
built a board walk between it and the mainland. As
we said earlier, it wasn't that far to the nearest point.
(31:24):
The yacht club formally opened on the island on July four, nine,
sixty years after Newport had celebrated Ida Lewis Day. In
nine seven, the Coast Guard unveiled a new Keeper class
of bully tenders, with the first of fourteen ships of
that class, named the Ida Lewis. The Ida Lewis was
commissioned on April twelfth, nine and a station from Newport.
(31:49):
The crew of the Ida Lewis also paid for the
restoration of Lewis's headstone at the Common Burial Ground in Newport. Today,
her boat The Rescue is in the collection of the
museum at Fort Adams. I tried to look into whether
this museum is still a place that can be visited.
That's a little hard to determine, giving the fact that
(32:09):
everything is closed right now. You definitely cannot visit it
right now when we're recorded, sure can't. On February seventeen,
Ida Louis was honored with a Google Doodle for her
hundred and seventy fifth birthday, and in eighteen a road
was named in her honor at Arlington National Cemetery, making
(32:29):
her the first woman to be so honored. I also
thought that we would end on a quote from her
which I particularly love and which I also feel like
is appropriate given the time that we're living in right now.
She said, quote, if there were some people out there
who needed my help, I would get into my boat
and go to them, even if I knew I couldn't
get back, wouldn't you? Uh? And I'd also liked if
(32:53):
you would like to know more about her, you can
read a book called lighthouse Keeper's Daughter. The remarkable true
story of Harold in Ida Lewis is one of the
sources for this episode. UM, do you also have some
listener mail for us? By just a totally delightful coincidence,
Tiffany left this note on our Facebook wall yesterday. Tiffany says, so,
(33:18):
I just recently listened to the Flannon Aisles Lighthouse podcast.
I'm that person that has to listen from the beginning
and cannot skip ahead. Anyways, Tracy mentioned that she would
like the lighthouse job. Does working from home make you
feel like you're working at the lighthouse and secondly, are
you enjoying it as much as you thought you would? Anyways,
stay healthy and I'll continue to listen. Maybe I'll catch
(33:39):
up in a year or two. Um. Thank you so much,
Tiffany for this fortuitously coincidentally, very well timed question. Um So,
uh we talked as is I think the only other
episode that we've done that's really about a lighthouse. Um,
because when I landed on this idea for an episode,
I was sort of just making sure we had not
(33:59):
done thinks super duper similar. And I remember saying, uh
in that episode that I felt like I would really
like being a lighthousekeeper. Uh. I think when that episode
came out, I don't think I was married yet. I'm
not even sure. I must have been at least dating
(34:21):
my husband by that point. Um. But I have actually
been working from home on this podcast since. And I
also have always been a pretty introverted person, and so
long before the current pandemic, I would sort of reach
(34:42):
a point in a week where I would kind of think,
to myself, when is the last time that I went outside?
Perhaps I should go outside today. Vitamin D is good
for you. Um. So, in a very strange way the
current Um. I don't think we have escalated to a
shelter in place you're in Massachusetts yet, but the governor
did issue a stay at home directive. Um, and it
(35:05):
weirdly does not feel that much different from my typical
day to day life except my husband is with me.
That's not like it was before. UM. So yeah, it's
it's a very strange thing where I know a lot
of folks who are a lot more social and a
lot more extroverted than I am, who have really been
struggling with the staying at home where I have been
(35:27):
sort of like, yes, this this steels um in terms
of my day to day workplace functioning, it feels a
lot like normal. Um. So thanks Tiffany for this question.
It just it delights me so much that it happens
to be asked right before we were going to record
an episode about a lighthousekeeper. For reference, that episode originally
came out in August of Okay, Patrick and I were dating, Yeah,
(35:51):
I had not moved in with him. No, so you
were still living alone and had been for a while.
So yeah, I, Um, I'm telling you, I thought I
was gonna go bananas having to stay home and I
love it. Um part of me almost thinks I caused
(36:12):
this by all the times that I said as I
left the house, I wish I could stay home with
you and the cats, And now I get to stay
on with Brian and the cats, and it's um uh pandemic.
Aside which I certainly have concerns about, it's pretty great.
I love it. I love getting all this time with
Brian and my house. And also I think because I
have been traveling so much in the last year, Yeah,
(36:34):
I'm like, what do you mean there's no trip on
my calendar. It's pretty great. Yeah. For the context for
listeners who who may not know your your job has
evolved to include executive producing a lot of other shows,
and that has involved a lot, a lot of travel. Yeah,
a lot, a lot, a lot of Like there's the
travel that you and I do together for the show,
(36:54):
and then there's this whole world of other travel. It
is very common for me to uh finished writing whatever
that week's show is on Monday. I basically spend all
day working on that. We record on Tuesday morning, and
then I run right to the airport and that's been
late and then I get home either on like Saturday
or Sunday, and that's been the way my weeks have
(37:14):
been playing out for a while. So like to be
able to just sit here with none of that on
the horizon is feels like an incredible gift because I
really missed my home and my husband and my fuzzy
babies up And I'll just reiterate a thing that we
said in Monday, like we we both feel incredibly fortunate
(37:35):
to be in in a state where it and in
terms of our home, daily lives, lives feels like manageable
and safe. So anyway, thank you again for asking me
about the Flanton Aisles lighthouse comment that I made back
in a very different world than we're feeling like. Run
right now if you like to write to us about
(37:56):
this or any other podcast or a history podcast that
I heart radio dot com and then we are all
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(38:17):
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