{"id":9909,"date":"2014-07-18T11:33:39","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T15:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=9909"},"modified":"2014-07-18T11:33:39","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T15:33:39","slug":"lighthouse-overnight-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/lighthouse-overnight-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Lighthouse Overnight House"},"content":{"rendered":"

July\/August 2014 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Find your lost horizon by checking in at one of these lighthouse inns.<\/h3>\n

By Claire Z. Cramer<\/p>\n

\"Lighthouse-Overnight-House\"<\/a>Whitehead Light Station is one lucky lighthouse. Commissioned in 1803 as the seventh oldest lighthouse in the U.S. by President Thomas Jefferson, it received a 12-year makeover starting in 1997 when non-profit Pine Island Camp of Belgrade Lakes acquired it via the Maine Lights Program. Since 2009, the landmark has hosted retreats and entertains guests throughout the year.<\/p>\n

Whitehead sits on 11 acres of 70-acre Whitehead Island off Spruce Head, three miles northeast of Tenants Harbor. \u201cThe innkeeper\u2019s house was built in 1891 as a duplex because two families took turns keeping it,\u201d says Gigi Lirot, the island\u2019s manager as well as a licensed USCG captain, single-engine pilot, and avid scuba diver. Today, there are seven bedrooms, each with private bath. It\u2019s $629 per couple for all-inclusive theme weekends such as cooking, wine and food, knitting. The entire cottage also rents by the week from $4,900.<\/p>\n

Be prepared for splendid isolation. Whitehead Island averages \u201c80 days of thick fog per year,\u201d according Jeremy D\u2019Entremont, historian for the American Lighthouse Foundation.<\/p>\n

“There are no half-hearted guests at Goose Rocks. People either get it or they don\u2019t,\u201d says Dr. Casey Jordan, whose non-profit Beacon Preservation maintains Goose Rock, a lonely, lovely beacon in the Fox Islands Thoroughfare half a mile off North Haven Island. \u201cWe actually had guests on three nights last week.\u201d Jordan purchased her lighthouse outright in 2006. She created the non-profit because she believed in \u201cthe whole ethos\u2013a lighthouse should be about education and preservation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goose Rocks is full immersion: there\u2019s no island to roam. It\u2019s just<\/em> a lighthouse. You access the almost enchanted accommodations by climbing a vertical ladder. There\u2019s solar power, \u201cenough to charge your phone and run the composting toilet.\u201d For the most part, children are not permitted.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople call and say they want to rent the lighthouse. You don\u2019t rent, you make a donation to Beacon. Every dime goes into preservation.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou feel like the lighthouse keeper<\/em>. This isn\u2019t a B&B. There\u2019s no room service. You\u2019re going to experience terrible weather, you\u2019re going to get wet. You\u2019re going to bring your own food and grill it outside. You can\u2019t call us at midnight for a beer run. I stayed out there five consecutive nights once by myself. It got a little Stephen King. I was socked in fog, and it wasn\u2019t safe to take the boat out.\u201d<\/p>\n

What sorts of people seek out this experience? \u201cNinety percent of the guests are fantastic\u2013they\u2019ll say it was the high point of their trip to Maine, they send Christmas cards. We just had a couple in their 60s\u2013it was on his bucket list.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jordan was the lightkeeper in 2010 and 2011. This summer, \u201cI have a terrific engineering student, Tim Sweret, taking care of the lighthouse. It\u2019s a tough job. You have to strip the linens, take them all to North Haven to launder and then return them, haul gallons and gallons of water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Up to six people can stay at Goose Rocks for a minimum of $600.<\/p>\n

Casey Jordan also started the Green Light\u00a0 Academy in 2009, a two-week immersion program every summer for students to learn about lighthouses and visit a number of them. The academy is able to utilize the campus of the College of the Atlantic for its base.<\/p>\n

In her other life, she\u2019s a college professor. \u201cI teach criminology at Western Connecticut University, and I\u2019m a consultant for Investigation Discovery\u2013the crime channel. I work on a show called Wives With Knives<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

“There are 300 to 400 people on the island in the summer, but only 38 in winter,\u201d says Marshall Chapman, owner and innkeeper of Isle au Haut\u2019s Keeper\u2019s House.<\/p>\n

Isle Au Haut\u2019s lighthouse and outbuildings were built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1907 land purchased from Charles Robinson. In 1934, the light was automated and the government sold everything except the actual light, which is just offshore, back to the Robinsons. In 1986, Jeffrey and Judi Burke bought the property and turned it into an inn they called the Keeper\u2019s House.<\/p>\n

The island stands seven miles off the tip of Stonington, a mythical beyond in Penobscot Bay, allegedly the last place in America to retire the crank telephone.<\/p>\n

Marshall Chapman purchased the property in 2012. In winters, he\u2019s a geology professor at the University of Kentucky. Summers, he presides over the operation and guests at the Keeper\u2019s House\u2013a four-room inn\u2013and the tiny Oil House Bungalow, and two-bedroom Woodshed Cottage. ($350\/$375; 2-night minimum; includes three meals a day).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a modicum of solar electricity, and there is one outlet in every room. Each guest is given a candle lantern and a head lamp for reading in bed\u2013we\u2019re not completely 1907. We serve three gourmet meals a day. My cooks are excellent. We have a garden, and lobster and halibut right off the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in the library? \u201cOh this and that. I\u2019ve added biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and some mysteries. There\u2019s some progressive stuff left from the Burkes\u2019 days, Abbie Hoffman\u2019s Steal This Book<\/em>, that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless there\u2019s foul weather, though, our guests aren\u2019t the type to hang around reading. They\u2019re out hiking or riding our bikes. In the evenings, after a five-course meal, they go to bed pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are five mail boats a day to Stonington; the first one leaves here at 8 a.m. and returns at 4:30. Sometimes guests go spend the day exploring the Blue Hill peninsula.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost guests spend two nights and say they wish they\u2019d booked a third. It takes two to find your rhythm. You live by the tide here, and the mailboat schedule, and whether internet service is up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July\/August 2014
\nFind your lost horizon by checking in at one of these lighthouse inns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9914,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-9909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-julyaugust-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9909"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9915,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9909\/revisions\/9915"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}