The Potato Chip Lighthouse

Lighthouses are wonderful symbols for brands and logos. A stroll through the grocery aisles will tell you so. They’re on so many products—clam chowder, oyster crackers, juice drinks, canned sardines, salad dressing, and potato chips, to name just a few. Sometimes the lighthouse pictured is a generic one. Sometimes it’s a real lighthouse, like the one on Cape Cod Potato Chips bags. They’re my favorite chips, not just because they taste good and I’m a chipoholic, but because they support lighthouse preservation and education through their logo. (And…don’t tell, but Nauset Beach Lighthouse is my favorite!)

I thought you might enjoy learning about the famous potato chip lighthouse at Nauset Beach, Eastham, on Cape Cod National Seashore. It’s had a storied career! It stands watch on the “backside” of Cape Cod. If you imagine the Cape as an arm where the shoulder connects to the mainland and extends first east like a flexed biceps muscle and then north up the forearm to the fist, you can see the shape of Cape Cod. The “backside” is the name for the outside forearm beach that runs north-south up the middle of the cape. It’s one of the cape’s more dangerous places. Ships heading south toward Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, or north toward Boston, pass by the “backside” of Cape Cod. It was and remains a dangerous area, rife with shoals and rocks and all manner of wild weather.

By the 1830s when lighthouse construction was in full swing in the United States, several lighthouses stood along this shore. There was a single beacon at Highland Light near Truro and twin lighthouses at Chatham on the elbow of the cape. Why twin lights? At this time, the United States had not adopted a technology to make lighthouses flash, so multiple lights were used in places where many beacons stood almost back to back along a treacherous stretch of shore, all of them white and all steady. The idea was that mariners would not confuse these close-together white, fixed lights. If some locations had multiple lights, they could be distinguished from places with single lights. It sounds like an over-lighting practice, and it was, but it was all we had in the United States before about 1850.

National Archives photo

On a shoreline as dangerous as the “backside,” a skipper needed to be able to see a light off the bow of a ship as one disappeared off the stern. But nothing stood between Highland Light and the Chatham twin lights. Coastal vessels—usually small fishing types that hugged the shoreline—often got into trouble on the “backside.” Thus, in 1837 the U.S. Lighthouse Service decided to put a navigational aid on the cliffs at Eastham, about hallway between Highland and Chatham.

To avoid confusion, they opted for triple lights—three diminutive little lighthouses standing on the cliff about 150 feet apart. Each one was 15 feet tall, whitewashed brick, and topped with a black lantern. The three little lighthouses looked like women in white skirts and black hats. Sailors quickly dubbed them the “Three Sisters” lighthouses. They began their career with simple oil lamps and reflectors that produced fixed white lights. Years, later they were upgraded with sixth-order Fresnel lenses in 1858 and fourth-order Fresnel lenses in 1873. These optics cast their beams far enough to sea that the coastal vessels and those traveling several miles offshore had guidance along the perilous “backside.”

Coast Guard photo

If you know this area, then you know nothing is static about the cliffs, hollows, and beaches on Cape Cod. They are in constant flux. Wind, tides, and storms continually chisel away at these features. Sand is an easily movable material, so willing to blow this way or that. The sandy beach and cliffs at Nauset have changed considerably in my lifetime alone, and much more in the three hundred years lighthouses have guarded the cape. Very large storms can eat away a foot of the cliff in a matter of hours. On average, it loses 2 to 3 feet a year. Between 2009 and 2018, the beach cliffs lost 16 feet of sand per year. Likewise, the cliffs at Highland Lighthouse and the low beach at Chatham have changed shape and shrunk over the years.

The author and husband, Jonathan, in autumn 1977 at Nauset Beach. Pregnant with son Scott. Photo was taken by our five-year-old daughter, Jessica. Note the cliffs.

By 1892 the “Three Sisters” lighthouses seemed as if they had hiked up their skirts and walked to the edge of the cliff. In reality, the cliff had eroded away and crept up on the hems of their skirts. The Lighthouse Service abandoned the three brick lighthouses that year and built three new 22 foot tall wooden “Sisters” 30 feet west of the original site, well away from the cliff everyone thought.  But within two decades the hungry elements had eaten back the cliff and again threatened the little towers. They were moved again in 1911, back some 100 feet from the cliff this time.

By now, the need for multiple lights was long gone. Lenses could flash, occult, eclipse, and otherwise identify themselves in a variety of patterns. The multiple lights at Chatham (twin lights) and Nauset (triple lights) hadn’t really been necessary since the 1850s when the Fresnel lens technology was adopted at American lighthouses. But Cape Codders loved their multiple lights and couldn’t give up the tradition. They were like family! When the Lighthouse Board suggested demolishing the twins and triplets, public outcry was loud and forceful!

The tower on the left was barged from Chatham to Nauset Beach.

Rather than destroy the extra towers, they were extinguished and moved. In 1911 after a second move back from the cliff, the Lighthouse Service opted to relight just one of the “Sisters”—the middle one. She became known as “The Beacon.” The other two “Sisters” stood dark for a time, and then they lost their hats when the government removed them and sold them to Mrs. Helen Cummings of Eastham for $3.50. (The lanterns have  never been found, unfortunately.) Mrs. Cummings had the two towers jacked them up on a low, makeshift trailer and carted off to her beach home where they were positioned at either end of the cottage. It was an anguished family separation. Lighthouses don’t translate well into vacation cottages or other non-historic uses. They lose their mission and cultural integrity, and sometimes they look foolish. These did.

The fate of the Three Sisters--top photo from National Park Service shows two of the sisters used as the ends of a summer cottage. No one knows where their lanterns went. Bottom photo by Jonathan DeWire shows the author in front of "The Beacon," the only sister to keep its lantern, on the beach at Nauset in 1978.

The remaining “Sister,” still called “The Beacon,” flashed her light another five years before she, too, was decommissioned and sold into private hands. She was used for various purposes over the years. When I first saw her in April 1979 she appeared to have hosted a sandwich shop the summer prior. I had read about the “Three Sisters” in an Edward Rowe Snow book—Famous Lighthouses of New England. Intrigued, I set about researching the “Sisters,” and the Nauset Lighthouse, which in 1979 stood a few hundred yards from the defunct “Beacon” and wore a handsome red and white daymark. (The daymark was added in 1940.)

I learned that the Nauset Light had traveled up the cape from Chatham in 1923 to take the place of “The Beacon.” Chatham’s twin lights, built in 1877, weren’t needed any more than Nauset’s triplets were. So the twins were separated, and the north twin at Chatham was removed from its foundation and carried up to Nauset, parked high on the cliff, and painted with her familiar daymark. A sturdy wood-shingled house was built next to it for the keeper.

As automation became the buzzword for the Coast Guard after World War II, most of the cape’s lighthouses were relieved of their keepers and outfitted with self-sufficient beacons and fog signals. Nauset Beach Lighthouse was automated in the early 1950s and the unoccupied keeper’s house was sold into private hands. Business woman Mary Daubenspeck of New Hanpshire bought the house in the 1970s. I met Mary in the mid 1980s and enjoyed a tour of her house and a climb up the lighthouse. The Coast Guard had given her a set of keys to the tower in case anything needed immediate attention. She admitted about the only attention the tower got was tours for her friends and guests and an occasional window washing. It was sturdy, and the Coast Guard checked on it about twice a year to make sure the beacon was operating properly.

Mary Daubenspeck and her dogs at the base of the lighthouse. Mary died of cancer in 2001. Photo from Dartmouth.edu.

Mary told me the Cape Cod National Seashore had purchased the “Three Sisters” lighthouses from their private owners and wanted to recoup the “backside’s” lighthouse history. The “Sisters” were in storage awaiting funding for preservation and interpretation. The national seashore also didn’t want to see Nauset Beach Lighthouse lost, either to the sea or neglect.

Everyone, including Mary Daubenspeck, was concerned about the edge of the cliff creeping ever closer to the keeper’s house and the tower.  The Coast Guard was concerned too, so much that they felt the lighthouse would eventually have to be decommissioned and torn down. It wasn’t really needed anymore, not with GPS and better ship navigation in the modern age. There was no way to shore up the cliff without a huge expenditure, and even then the project would only slow erosion. Nature would win in the end. Mary told me she hoped a group might form to move the historic lighthouse to a safer location back from the beach—just as the “Three Sisters” had been moved several times.

It was no surprise in 1993 when the Coast Guard announced that it would decommission Nauset Beach Lighthouse, in spite of the fact that it had been admitted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. There was no money in the Coast Guard budget to save it. But a group quickly formed called the Nauset Light Preservation Society, composed of local Cape Codders, and got to work fundraising and making the public aware of the plight of this historic light station.

In the mid-1990s I met the tireless leader of the Nauset Light Preservation Society, Pam Nobili. (Pam died a few years ago and is greatly missed for her energy and hard work.) She established a gift shop on the beach and headed up fundraisers. (She sold my books in the shop too!) Money was raised, grants were obtained, and in 1996 the lighthouse was moved off its foundation so close to the cliff, loaded onto a special hydraulically-balanced truck, and transported to a safer location back from the sea. Additionally, Mary Daubenspeck negotiated an agreement with the National Park Service to donate her house to the Cape Cod National Seashore, and it too was moved back from the edge of the cliff in 1998. The tower’s fourth-order lens was removed and placed on display in the Salt Pond Visitor Center of the national seashore. Mary Daubenspeck wrote a little book about the lighthouse. She died of cancer in 2001. Her generosity in giving back to Cape Cod one of its historic buildings is remembered and honored at the present-day site of the tower and keeper’s house.

On display today in a wooded area behind the current lighthouse. Photo by The Lighthouse People

“All’s well that ends well!” Today, visitors to the Cape Cod National Seashore can expect a treat: The “Three Sisters” lighthouses have been refurbished and put on display in a wooded area near the beach where they once served shipping. Nauset Beach Lighthouse and its dwelling also are preserved for viewing and enjoyment. Plenty of signage helps visitors appreciate this unique chapter in lighthouse history—triple lighthouses and a twin light that metaphorically walked up the “backside” of the cape to work on Nauset Beach.

You can join the group that saved this treasure by writing to Nauset Light Preservation Society, P.O. Box 941, Eastham, MA 02642. Their website is nausetlight.org.

And if you’re hungry for potato chips, get yourself some free ones at the Cape Cod Potato Chip factory in Hyannis, Massachusetts. You can tour the factory, learn about the company’s involvement in saving the Nauset Beach Lighthouse, and try some its many flavors of chips. The factory is located at 1000 Breed’s Hill Road in Hyannis. Tours are offered Mon-Fri 9:00-5:00. More information can be found at capecodchips.com or facebook.com/capecodchips.