[This story is very evocative for me. I spent many memorable days on the waters of Boston Harbor, Boston Light marked the place where you were leaving the relative calm of the civilized waters and heading out to the open ocean. “Next stop, Portugal,” my father used to say. The song at the end of this piece was co-written by George Gray, a playwright and director for a play he wrote called Joanna Rowson is alive and well in Hull. It was staged on a site overlooking Nantasket Roads and Boston Light, stunning setting with the skyline of downtown Boston in the background. SB SM]
Celebrating the experiences of Sally Snowman, who will soon retire as the only female lighthouse keeper in the Boston Light’s 307-year history.
by Diana Cervantes
December 19, 2023
Sally Snowman, lighthouse keeper and historian of the Boston Light, looks out at waves crashing on Little Brewster Island off the Massachusetts coast as she ties her signature bonnet. Snowman has been caring for the lighthouse since 2003. She is the first female keeper in the light’s history and will retire after 20 years on December 31, 2023.
On one of her final days on Massachusetts’s Little Brewster Island, Sally Snowman, the only remaining official lighthouse keeper in the United States, went ambling over the rocky terrain to caw into the wind with the gulls and say a blessing. She called, “the spirits from the beyond, the beyond, the beyond, to watch out for [the lighthouse] to ensure everything will remain safe up there.”
For most of her tenure, she lived on the island, giving tours to visitors on Fridays through Sundays. The lighthouse once saw thousands of visitors annually. She was one of them, once: Snowman accompanied her coast guard–auxiliarist father to the island when she was 10 years old. As she stepped on shore, she declared she wanted to be married there someday. In 1994, she and her husband, Jay Thomson, held their wedding ceremony on Little Brewster Island near the base of the light.
For 20 years, Snowman has served as the keeper and historian of the 307-year-old Boston Light. Dressed either in a coast guard uniform or a costume inspired by what a lighthouse keeper’s wife wore in the 18th century, she’ll ascend the 76 spiraling stairs up the lighthouse to clean the windows and polish the lenses of the light that keeps mariners from smashing into rocks; mow the grass that, in the summer, can reach her knees; check for anything needing maintenance; and clean. “Because we have six buildings and only one is heated, they get pretty grungy quickly with spiderwebs and bugs, things that accumulate,” she says.
Nine years after that, Snowman, a college professor in education and coast guard volunteer, successfully applied for the keeper job. The work has been “just the dream of dreams,” she says.
When a lack of potable water and various other problems with the aging buildings forced the coast guard to close the island to the public in 2018, Snowman switched to commuting by boat twice a week from nearby North Weymouth, a crossing that can take up to an hour and a half in her six-meter skiff. She is typically joined by two auxiliary coast guard members who help with her rounds. Their time on the island is always limited by the weather and tidal cycle, as high tides and tumultuous seas make docking and scrambling to or from the boat precarious. In winter, Snowman typically has less than an hour to complete her work. When the weather is particularly bad, she’s unable to visit at all; in May 2023, storms kept her away all but four days.
Aside from the two volunteers, Snowman’s main companions now are the gulls who use the island as a nesting ground. Their eggs lie nestled and unhatched beneath the stairs of the lightkeeper’s home; their spent bodies decay in puddles on the rocky cliffs.
“Birds either come to the island to give birth or die,” Snowman says. When she stopped living on-site, birds—especially gulls—took over, she says. With more birds living and nesting on the island, more are dying there, too. Nearly every time she visits, she conducts a burial at sea for a gull, cormorant, or oystercatcher.
The coast guard will continue the upkeep of the Boston Light until a new steward is found; timeline unknown.
Set to retire at the end of this month, Snowman has longevity on her mind. “I think one of the reasons why I am a healthy 71-year-old [now 72] is because of the spirit of the lighthouse. And I wonder, when I’m not with it anymore, if the aging process will kick in.”
Knowing that weather might prevent her from making more trips, she has already said her goodbyes to the Boston Light and Little Brewster Island. Once she hangs up her bonnet, she will be giving presentations about her time as lightkeeper, combing through thousands of historical lighthouse documents on her living room floor to hand over to the coast guard, and working on other endeavors that bring her joy, such as teaching yoga and sound healing.
