New London's First Lighthouse
In her indispensable history, Frances Manwaring Caulkins reported that a navigational aid at the entrance to the harbor was installed as early as 1750, but no record remains.
In 1760 the colonial legislature approved a request by New London's merchants to build a lighthouse that would help prevent loss of life and cargo in the maritime commerce upon which the town depended. 500 pounds were appropriated, supplemented by the sale of lottery tickets.
Below: The lottery was announced in the New London newspaper by Timothy Green, official printer for the colony who also printed the tickets.
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The 64-foot stone tower, built in 1760 - only the fourth erected in the colonies - was neither tall nor bright enough, and when a crack developed below its wooden lantern plans were made for a replacement.
The new tower was built of brown sandstone by Abisha Woodward in 1801, replacing the earlier tower built of different stone, possibly granite, and has always been whitewashed or painted white.
The Harbor Light we see today is featured on the cover of Robert Bachand's Northeast Lights.
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Among the interesting details in Jeremy d'Entremont's Lighthouses of Connecticut is a New London merchant's contract with President George Washington to provide oil and other supplies for the original light; installation in the taller second tower of an "eclipser," a screen that circled around the lamp to create the "on-off" flash; and the installation in 1857 of a fourth-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in Paris and still in use today.
At first glance the lighthouse on the cover looks like Harbor Light, but is in fact Five Mile Point Light in New Haven, built in 1847, decommissioned in 1877 and now the centerpiece of Lighthouse Point Park.
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New London Harbor Light was chosen for the jacket illustration of Sara E. Wermiel's authoritative history of American lighthouses, a title in the Library of Congress's "Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design and Engineering." One of the hundreds of thousands of images in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division, this is perhaps the finest photograph of Harbor Light and its vanished outbuildings taken around the time of its centenary.