Gurnet Light has been offering guidance to ships since 1768. It stands 102 high atop “the Gurnet,” a bluff that juts like a pointy elbow from the long spit of sand that runs southward from Duxbury and Marshfield, and then right-angles west, pointing the seafaring traveler into Plymouth Harbor.
Edward Rose Snow, in his book The Lighthouses of New England, tells us that “The name Gurnet probably came from one of several similar headlands in the English Channel, many of them called the Gurnet after the fish of the same name, which is caught in great numbers along the coast of Devonshire.”
The original lighthouse, according to Snow, cost 660 pounds to build. John and Hannah Thomas, who owned the land, were paid 5 shillings a year – plus a fee to operate it. It stood 20 feet high, 30 feet long and 15 feet wide, with a “l;anthorn” at each end of the building. “It was here at Plymouth’s Gurnet Light that, for the first time in America, the system of having two different ‘twin’ lights was begun,” Snow wrote.
Gurnet Light is also known as the only Massachusetts lighthouse to have been hit by a cannonball, Snow says. The towns of Plymouth, Duxbury and Kingston erected a fort on the Gurnet, and during the Revolutionary War, as the fort exchanged fire with the grounded British frigate Niger, a wayward shot from the ship pierced the lighthouse.
Gurnet Light sits at the center of many stories, both exciting and grim. The water of Plymouth Harbor is quite shoal, as it is off Gurnet Point. Gurnet Light has helped many a sailor find refuge from raging seas – it has seen many a devastating wreck, destruction and death as well.
Gurnet Light has been replaced, refurbished, rebuilt and moved. It shone two lights for 156 years, at different heights and at different power. Now a single light, under solar power, flashes alternating single and double flashes at 700,000 candlepower.
Last weekend, in conjunction with the Opening of the Bay festivities hosted by the Duxbury Bay Maritime School in Snug Harbor, Duxbury, Snow’s daughter, Dolly Snow Bicknell, gave tours of the historic lighthouse. Bicknell is the president of the volunteer group Project Gurnet & Bug Lights, which preserves Gurnet Light and its companion channel light entering Plymouth Harbor, Duxbury Pier Light, or “Bug Light,” as it’s known locally. Bug Light, a sparkplug-type lighthouse, lies just south and west of the Gurnet, off the end of Plymouth Long Beach. While the only land means to get to the Gurnet is along Duxbury Beach, the Gurnet is actually a part of Plymouth. Bug Light sits in Duxbury. And Bug Light is in need of significant restoration. Bicknell’s organization is fundraising for that purpose.
More information about Gurnet and Bug lights can be found at the Project Gurnet & Bug Lights website, www.buglight.org. Copies of The Lighthouses of New England and other coastal books by Edward Rowe Snow are available at www.commonwealtheditions.com.
