![]() ![]() War briefly touched the point again during the short-lived Spanish-American War in 1898. ![]() Both it and the keeper’s house remain standing today in Lighthouse Point Park. Opened in 1847, the second lighthouse was in commission for 30 years, until the Southwest Ledge light was built farther out on a breakwater. Its keeper lived in a nearby brick house, originally connected to the lighthouse by a wooden passageway. Also octagonal, it was constructed of East Haven sandstone with a brick interior. “At least one ship ran onto the rocks, reportedly just one mile from the lighthouse, and was pounded to pieces.” So, the government tried again.Ī new lighthouse was built to a height of 70 feet. Unfortunately, this lighthouse, with a relatively weak, static beacon, was located nearly at sea level and “too far north on the shore to be seen by ships coming from the east.” Consequently, it was “no protection from disaster,” the city’s website says. It is believed that the first lantern burned whale oil.” An iron lantern surrounded the top of the tower. ![]() “The tower was approximately 18 feet at its base and 30 feet tall. This first lighthouse was a “shingled, wooden structure, octagonal in shape,” the city’s website notes. “Tryon’s vindictive attitude toward the patriots needs no further documentation than his own statement, that he would like ‘to burn every Committee Man’s house’ within his reach.” But slightly cooler heads looking for an “unhampered evacuation” prevailed, and British troops left the area mostly intact when, on July 7, they headed west to wreak further havoc on Fairfield and Norwalk.Ī generation later, in 1804, Amos Morris sold land on Morris Point to the brand new US government for the express purpose of finally building a lighthouse, “with the privilege of passing back and forth through my land for the accommodation of said Light House and the keeper of it, in procuring and conveying necessary supplies,” according to East Haven town records quoted in The East Side of New Haven Harbor by Marjorie F. Osterweis writes in Three Centuries of New Haven (1953). On July 5, 1779, British forces under Major General William Tryon made two landings at Morris Point, took nearby Black Rock Fort and Beacon Hill and “organized pillaging parties to roam about the East Haven section and terrorize the inhabitants” before moving into the countryside, Rollin G. Among other things, a lighthouse was sorely needed.īut that was still a long way off, and in the meantime, there was a revolution to contend with. “Even the settlers of the 17th century had fretted over the shallow harbor,” write Floyd Shumway and Richard Hegel in New Haven: An Illustrated History (1981). But it turned out the fledgling port wasn’t quite as conducive to trade as early colonists had hoped. Pinning much of their hopes for prosperity on the impressive harbor, Puritan English settlers purchased large tracts of land including Lighthouse Point from the Quinnipiac, who retained a 1,200-acre reservation in what later became East Haven and Morris Cove. Earlier still, it was the domain of the Quinnipiac, whose main village “sat at the intersection of a number of important travel routes that ran along the shore and to other Indian communities in the interior,” writes Paul Grant-Costa in “Quinnipiac: The People of the Long Water Land.” sponsored by The human history of this point of land that reaches like the toe of a boot into the harbor goes back much farther, though, than its name might suggest.īefore it was Lighthouse Point, it was known both as Morris Point and Five Mile Point, a nod to its distance from the New Haven Green. ![]() Nevertheless, it’s an impressive landmark on the east side of New Haven Harbor, visible from downtown as well as out in Long Island Sound. T he eponymous lighthouse on Lighthouse Point hasn’t been lit since 1877. ![]()
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