Nantucket Official Guide | Page 26

Traveling Light:

The Preservation of
‘Sconset’s Iconic Sentinel
“And therefore never send to know for whom the Bluff tolls.”

©George Riethof / Nantucket Aerial

By June R. Meyers

Twenty-one thousand years ago, at the end
of the last Ice Age, an aggregate of soil, rocks
and pebbles deposited by a glacial moraine
ultimately formed the Island of Nantucket.
Erosion, hastened by relentless nor’easters
and high-velocity winds, is inevitable here,
considering the island’s sedimentary makeup.
(A sobering fact: the powerful “No Name
Storm” of 1990 carved 17 feet off of Sankaty
Head in a matter of days.)
Nowhere has its toll been more profound
than ‘Sconset Bluff where the Sankaty Head
Lighthouse was erected in February 1850.
(Sankaty is the Wampanoag word for
“highland.”) Constructed of 450 tons of brick
and granite transported from the mainland
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aboard schooners, the silent 70-foot sentinel
was situated a safe 280 feet from the bluff’s
edge. Its 3,500+ pound Fresnel lens –
operating at 720,000 candle power – is
visible at a distance of 25 miles, making it the
brightest of New England’s lighthouse
beacons. Standing guard 100 feet above the
roiling ocean, Sankaty Head Light is evervigilant, alerting mariners to the constantly
shifting shoals and sandbars of the
treacherous waters once dubbed the
“Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
How ironic then that a stalwart guardian of
this precarious swath of sea for over two
centuries could ultimately succumb to the very
forces of nature it protected against. In 2007,