Kate Walker here, keeping the light on Robbins Reef.
If you plan to come visit me, be careful you don’t get your feet tangled up in your long skirts as you come up that ladder. It takes both hands to climb up or down the ladder, so you don’t have a free hand to gather up your skirts. I very discretely tucked the hem of my dress into my skirt band when I had to hurry down the ladder to launch my dinghy and help some ship-wrecked sailor.
Women didn’t wear pants in the 1890s. It was considered indecorous, and I wasn’t going to do anything to rouse the Lighthouse Inspector’s disapproval. There was one female keeper, however, who didn’t let that worry her because her invalid father was the official keeper. Kathleen Moore at Black Rock Harbor Light on the north shore of Long Island Sound slept at night, dressed in a suit of boy’s clothes. “Our house was forty rods from the light tower, and to reach it I had to walk across two planks under which on stormy nights was four feet of water.” Water-logged skirts were one hazard that Kathleen didn’t intend to endure.
In addition to tending the light on her house at Michigan City, Indiana, Harriet Colfax put a lamp in the beacon at the end of a 1,500-foot-long pier that had an elevated walkway.
In her log Harriet mentioned on September 18, 1872, “Heavy gale. The waves, dashing over both Piers, very nearly carrying me with them into the lake.” The storms she described buffeted her with gusts of wind, flinging not only waves across the walkway, but also blinding sheets of spray and sleet. She must have gotten soaked.
In 1883 the Light-House Board issued an official keeper uniform—double-breasted coat with yellow buttons, dark blue trousers, and a cap bearing a yellow metal lighthouse badge. But women keepers were exempted from wearing them.
Someone should have designed a uniform for female keepers and female assistants—water-proof boots and a divided skirt with buttonholes in the skirt hem that could be fastened to buttons on the belt when keepers had to traverse an elevated walkway during a storm.
Information found in the New York Sunday World, 1889, and the Bridgeport Standard, March 25, 1878. Harriet Colfax’s log is in the National Archives, Record Group 26, Entry 80 (NC-31).
Submitted July 6, 2017
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U.S. Lighthouse Society News is produced by the U.S. Lighthouse Society to support lighthouse preservation, history, education and research. Please consider joining the U.S. Lighthouse Society if you are not already a member. If you have items of interest to the lighthouse community and its supporters, please email them to candace@uslhs.org.
I didn’t see the credit. Did you write this, Candice? Very interesting. There’s the fable of Kate rowing her daughters to Staten Island every day, too, but fact is she took them in once a week, and they stayed with relatives so they could attend school and Kate could watch the light. And, a fact I find really cool for the female light-keepers is that it took the Lighthouse Service over a decade to admit a tiny woman like Kate could handle the job by herself, but when they replaced her upon her retirement, it was with three strong men!!
Loving the ‘running commentary’ on Kate Walker. She was one of my favorite subjects when I gave tours at Sandy Hook lighthouse since she had such a connection there.
This one is a ‘keeper’ (no pun intended)
Al Smith
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