Two Silver Cats: Burnt Island Part 2: Island Bingo and Living History

We played lots of cool games and learned all kinds of things about this island. For Island Bingo, We were put into little groups, and we were all given a card with lots of photos on it, and we had to locate all of the items on the card as a way to discover all of the things on the 5 1/2 acre lump of stone that were were standing on. We had Katie in our group so we found all of our things in less than fifteen minutes! :)

The Lighthouse: This was the easiest thing to find, of course. It's 30 feet tall and is bright red on the top. You can't miss it.

The Foghorn: It's that white thing that, as one of the kids in my group said, "looks a little like a trashcan with eyes on it". Tooooooooooooooooooooooooot.

The Oil House: This is where oil for the lighthouse was stored. But what is that funny-looking "antenna" on the roof?

Lightning Rod: It looks kind of like a fork to me. An electric fork.

The Well: This well is brackish, but provided water that was used for laundry, bathing, and other chores that could be done with non-potable water.

Ace's Grave: Ace was a black lab who came to the island in the late 60's. He belonged to the sister of someone who lived on the island at the time. Apparently, when he was on the mainland, he barked constantly at everything. Putting him on the island was the best place for him, where he could be isolated and yet have plenty of room to romp. One day, however, he investigated a dead seagull a little too well and ended up getting mange. There was nothing that could be done, so he was put down and then brought back to the island. He was given a little grave which fascinates everyone who finds it.

The Slip: I just want to slide down this in a little boat: wheee splash!

The Covered Walkway: This connected the keeper's house to the tower building, so you wouldn't have to walk outside.

Turtle Rock: Doesn't it look like a sea turtle?

The Solar Panels: In the "olden days" there was a warning light that would come on if there was something wrong with the light in the tower, so that the keeper could run up and take care of whatever was wrong. Nowadays, since everything is automated, the light has solar back-up.

The Erratics: Dropped here by the glaciers, these are rocks that definitely don't look like they belong here. The rock on the far left has another name, BUTT-- ahem, I mean but, I will discuss that later...

The kids also discovered the tire swing. Whee!

For the Living History tour, we were transported back to the 1950's, and we met Mr. and Mrs. Muire and their granddaughter Linda, who were the current keeper family. Mrs. Muire (portrayed by the lovely Mrs. McKay) welcomed us to her house, and told us all about how she lived out here on an island.

Here is her kitchen. There was no running water or electricity, so there were a lot of gadgets that are unfamiliar to people living sixty years into the future. I think in this picture she is demonstrating how she used the pump in the sink. While non-potable water came from the well (and had to be carried in by the bucketful) drinking water was pumped up from a huge holding tank in the basement, which collected rainwater-- so Mrs. Muire often hoped for rain!

Here is Mrs. Muire's stove. In the winter it was fueled with coal (which the government supplied), but in the summer driftwood was used as the coal would make the stove too hot.

(In the next photo, see the teddy bear on CeeBee's lap? That is Cinnamon. CeeBee teaches a K, 1 and 2 class where Cinnamon is a "student." Cinnamon travels all over with members of the class and then writes in his journal about what he has seen. I just think it's funny that we all treated Cinnamon like a toddler and made sure he was "paying attention" to all of the cool things to see all around the island!)

Here is a close-up shot of some of the driftwood in the stove:

Now the Muires were pretty lucky: they had a bathtub! There was no running water, though, so water needed to be carried up from the well and heated in big pans on the stove. There was, however, a drain, so you didn't have to "bail out the tub": you could just pull the plug and the water would drain into the cellar.

The room where the bathtub was also the pantry. There were lots of gadgets and gizmos from the 1950's on those shelves: eggbeaters, a juicer, a meat grinder, bean pots, rolling pins, boxes that once contained salted fish, a potato ricer, lots of different strainers, etc. Most food was either tinned, canned or otherwise preserved in some way (the real Muire family had not-very-fond memories of canned milk...ugh!). Some vegetables were grown in the garden but had to hearty enough to survive in the constant wind and the arid conditions. Dinner often consisted of potatoes and preserved fish. Yummy!

(Later I will tell you a secret about these cupboards that are below the pantry shelves... hmmm....)

Through a short hallway we came to the dining room (though in the architectural plans it's called the "living room"). Here was a table in the center, a fireplace to heat the house, and a mantel to display the family keepsakes (including pictures of the family). Here is the table, where Linda has been playing with her paper dolls:

On one side of the room was a wireless radio, and on the other, a Victrola (which sadly doesn't play any more because the needle is broken).

Through the dining room are two open rooms: Mr. Muire's office on one side, and Mrs. Muire's bedroom on the other (the architectural plans call these two rooms the "parlor"). First, here is the office, which gave me goosebumps because it reminded me so much of the office my Grampie used to have:

Two of the most important things a keeper needs to have: the precious Underwood and the Keeper's record book. The keeper needed to keep track of everything that was used--right down to the amount of matches used to light the light!

The adding machine was also of utmost importance:

Here is Mrs. Muire's bedroom. Mrs. Muire used her room as a sewing room as well, and made feedsack dresses for her three daughters (and now, her granddaughter Linda).

There was also a beautiful treadle sewing machine "jenny" in one corner of the room but stupid me I didn't get a picture of it. I did, however, get this beautiful photo of "Linda", Mr. Muire's granddaughter. I don't know this girl's real name, but she played the part very well. When I saw her sitting in the light like this I knew I had to get her picture. It looks very Wyeth-like, don't you think?

(After I took the picture I turned the camera around so she could see the picture, and I had this super weird bizarre feeling-- it's 1950! They didn't have LCD screens back then!)

Hmm. I wonder what's up these stairs.... (we'll find out later-- the keeper's house has lots of secrets!)

Here's another shot of the kitchen:

After the tour of the house we got to talk with Mr. Muire, the keeper himself (sorry, I didn't get the name of the man who portrayed him). Look closely on his uniform: The K on his lapels stands for Keeper, and there are little lighthouses on his brass buttons!

So what is the lighthouse tower made of? Well, the whole island is made out of granite so it would be pretty silly to haul rocks in. Instead, the people who made the lighthouse decided where the keeper's house was going to be, and cut a cellar into the ledge that was there. All of the rock and the rubble that accumulated from this hole was moved up the hill and stacked up to make the tower. Here's an interesting fact: The lighthouse tower is the original one--it has never had to be taken down and rebuilt. The cement they used to hold it together was very solid and had no trouble solidifying. However, when they went to build the keeper's house the cement didn't harden right (maybe it was hotter or colder or whatnot at that time, or perhaps the lime they used was of lesser quality than the stuff they had used in the tower). They eventually had to tear down the original keeper's house and put up a wooden one.
Here is a bit of granite rubble like the kind they used in the tower:

As Mr. Muire talked I looked all around the view from the point. Next to the lighthouse tower is a flagpole. Here is a bit of funny trivia that Elaine told us later: there are lots of rules concerning the American flag, one is that you are supposed to put it up at dawn and take it down at dusk, and do so every day without fail. However, there is an exception to the rule that says if a light shines on it, then you can keep it up at night. Well, sometimes she gets a little lazy and doesn't take the flag down at the end of the day... but she is not exactly breaking the rule, is she? (I mean, there is a pretty significant light shining right on it...)

Anyway, back to Mr. Muire. Trivia time: What is the oldest lighthouse in Maine? Well, everyone knows that-- it's Portland Head Light, of course! Well...... yes..... sorta. The Head Light was built in 1791 under George Washington, so that makes it almost 220 years old, and Burnt Island Light was built in 1821, which makes it thirty years younger. So yes, the Head Light is older... but in 1791 Maine was still part of Massachusetts! Maine became its own state in 1820 and a year later Burnt Island Lightwas built! So Burnt Island is the oldest lighthouse in Maine, meaning "since Maine has been its own state"! --Oh, don't how we love semantics! :)

Here is "Linda" standing in the tower hallway, waiting for her her "grandfather" to call down to let the next group of visitors come up.

And then we got to go right up the inside of the tower to the lantern room-- first up a spiral staircase and then up nine very narrow steep steps. Let your eyes adjust-- it's a little bright up
here!

In the "olden days" the light was a hurricane lamp set inside a fresnel lens (which is pronounced "fray-nl", by the way, not "frez-nel"-- it's named after a French guy). The smoke from the lamp had to go somewhere, so there is a hole in the ceiling which leads to a ventilator ball. (Take another look at some of the other pictures of the outside of the lighthouse and you will see a little ball up there-- as well as another lightning rod!)

This hole in the wall is a sort of a damper which also was meant to give some ventilation to the lantern room.

To conserve electricity, the light doesn't come on in the daytime (unless it is dark and stormy, of course). However, there is a button that can be pressed to make the light come on, as you can see here:

So why is the Burnt Island light red? Well, originally, it wasn't. All of the lighthouses in the area were not meant not only to warn people of danger but also to guide them into the harbor. The boats could just follow one white light to another until they got into the harbor (a little like connect-the-dots). However, people would get the Burnt Island light confused with the ones on Ram Island and the one at the Cuckolds, so the government decided to change the characteristic of the lights. They decided Burnt Island should be red, so they put red glass in. They also decided that the lights should blink in certain patterns, so Burnt Island got to have one flash every six seconds.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but if you want to go directly from Cuckolds Light or from Ram Island light into the harbor, you'd crash. Why? Because Squirrel Island sits smack in the middle of the two! (Think of a Y shape, where there is a light at each point on the Y. Squirrel Island is the point in the middle!). So to help boats go around Squirrel Island, the people designing the light decided to have two clear-glass "slits" in the red glass-- one pointing right at Ram Island Light, the other at Cuckolds Light. So if you are in a boat, you could see either red flashes or white. "If you see red, you're dead!" Mr. Muire told us-- so if you maneuvered your boat to stay in the white, you'd be safe. Here is what the white light looks like from inside the lantern room: