Cedar Island Lighthouse

Cedar Island Lighthouse stands at the end of a sand spit that protrudes from Cedar Point State Park and guards the entrance to Sag Harbor Bay. When originally built, the lighthouse was on Cedar Island, named for the small stand of trees on the otherwise barren island, but the Great Hurricane of 1938 filled in the 200-yard gap between the island and the shore, turning it into a peninsula now known as Cedar Point.  The light’s purpose was to guide whalers and other ships into Northwest Bay and the port of Sag Harbor. Sag Harbor was once one of the most important ports on the East Coast.

The town’s whaling fleet began to place stake lights around Sag Harbor as early as 1810, and in 1838, the federal government purchased Cedar Island from the town of East Hampton for a new lighthouse. After Congress provided $1,000 in 1837 and another $2,500 in 1838, the original Cedar Island Lighthouse was built in 1839 in the form of a one-and-a-half-story keeper’s dwelling with a small tower centered on its pitched roof. The beacon in the lantern room was made of nine Winslow Lewis lamps with fourteen-inch reflectors, shining at thirty-two feet above sea level and having a range of 12.5 nautical miles. In 1855, a sixth-order Fresnel lens, illuminated by an Argand lamp, replaced the lamps and reflectors. 

Since the Cedar Island Lighthouse was decommissioned in 1934, it has passed through private hands until it became part of Suffolk County’s Cedar Point Park in the late 1960’s. Vandalism and weather have taken their toll on the Cedar Island Lighthouse. Its construction of granite from New England has withstood the test of time, but in 1974 a fire gutted the interior of the Lighthouse. At that time the building was sealed up and it continues to be to this day.

In the early 2000’s the Long Island Chapter of the United States Lighthouse Society raised the funds to restore the Cedar Island Oil House, the small structure next to the Lighthouse where oil to light the original beacon was stored. The Long Island chapter of the United States Lighthouse Society has been authorized by Suffolk County Parks to restore and “Relight the Lighthouse”.

 

Sources:

“Cedar Island Lighthouse.” LighthouseFriends, https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=737

“History.” Cedar Island Lighthouse, 10 Feb. 2021, https://www.cedarislandlighthouse.org/history/