![]() ![]() Trained as a nurse in a Lewiston hospital, she arrived on the island with a suitcase filled with medicines, bandages, penicillin, and hypodermic needles. Although I felt nauseous, I was very happy being reunited with my husband.” Dude’s previous Coast Guard jobs had forced the couple to live apart. “We accepted the lighthouse keeper’s job,” she said, “because it allowed us to live together for the first time. Huddled beneath the rounded hull of a Coast Guard boat with a baby in a bassinet, Betty became seasick on the ride out. The Browns had first arrived on Pond Island not a month earlier. Lighthouse keepers rowed ashore every three weeks to collect mail and acquire provisions in Phippsburg. Pond Island Lighthouse was located at the mouth of the Kennebec River, about a mile from the mainland. Approaching the island, he was guided to the slipway on the west-facing shore by the sound of crashing breakers on ledges below the bell house. And wouldn’t you know, as soon as I ran to the lighthouse to attend to my crying six-week-old baby Michael, the bell miraculously began clanging.” Dude had rowed past the island, but reoriented the 16-foot dory after hearing the bell. “I did everything I could think of to start that darn bell,” she remembered, “but it refused to work. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about the Hanover in The Pearl of Orr’s Island, published in 1861: “The story of this wreck of a home-bound ship just entering the harbor is yet told in many a family on this coast.” For nearly a hundred years, a copy of the book was kept in the Pond Island Lighthouse.Īware of that tragedy, Betty’s concern for her husband bordered on outright panic. A dog, the ship’s lone survivor, swam ashore. During the final leg of its homeward journey, the ship struck a bar in stormy seas and sank near Pond Island, losing all 24 crewmen. ![]() After the war, Pond Island became a transfer station for passengers traveling by steamship to Augusta, Bucksport, and Bangor.ĭavid Spinney, the island’s fourth lighthouse keeper in 1849, witnessed the capsizing of the Hanover, a Maine merchant ship returning to Bath following a three-year voyage to Spain and ports elsewhere. During the War of 1812, soldiers were stationed on Pond Island and nearby Fort Popham to prevent the British from entering this major waterway. A thick fog could fatally complicate the situation. Long before General Benedict Arnold and 1,100 Revolutionary War soldiers ascended the Kennebec River in September 1775, Native Americans struggled to navigate powerful currents colliding at the mouth. Hand-winding a wheeled mechanism inside the shed activated a descending weight, releasing a heavy spring, triggering a sledgehammer to strike the bell. The two-ton bell functioned like a grandfather clock. “But until I could get the fog bell striker to cooperate, he and ship captains would be courting trouble.” “Dude was rowing back to the island in fog as thick as pea soup,” recalled Brown, 66 years later. The two-ton bell, housed outside the shed, functioned like a grandfather clock: hand-winding a wheeled mechanism housed in the shed activated a descending weight, which released a heavy spring triggering a sledgehammer to strike the bell. On that late summer day in 1953, Betty, then 22, stood inside Pond Island’s fog bell shed struggling to recall Dude’s step-by-step instructions for operating the bell, which would help guide him home. Seguin Island Lighthouse, two miles farther out to sea, had been built in 1796. ![]() Located at the mouth of the Kennebec River, Pond Island Lighthouse was built in 1821 to mark the river’s west entrance. He had departed in sunshine but before he returned, a thick fogbank engulfed the lighthouse and much of coastal Maine. Her husband, Pond Island Lighthouse keeper Alton “Dude” Brown, had rowed a mile to Phippsburg to purchase groceries and collect mail-tasks he tackled every third week. Photo by Ronald Josephīetty Brown was distraught. Betty Brown, seen here at age 89, and her husband “Dude” staffed the Pond Island Lighthouse in 1953 as twenty-two year olds.
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