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The
town of Dennis is bounded by Cape Cod Bay on the north and Nantucket
Sound to the south. West Dennis—one of Dennis’s five villages—is in the
southwestern part of the town, separated from South Yarmouth by the
Bass River. The Dennis side of the river once had saltworks and
facilities for building small vessels, and many West Dennis residents
were involved in fishing and coastal trade.
For some years
before a lighthouse was built near the mouth of the Bass River in 1855,
a West Dennis resident, Warren Crowell, aided local navigation by
keeping a lantern burning in the attic window of his house at Wrinkle
Point. Local ship captains each donated 25 cents monthly so that
Crowell could buy the oil he needed to keep the lantern lit. As traffic in the area increased, so did the demand for a lighthouse. Congress
appropriated $4,000 for a lighthouse on September 28, 1850. After more
debate over the need for a lighthouse, the amount was reappropriated in
1853. A site near a breakwater at the mouth of the river was soon
selected. The land for the light station was purchased from
George W. Richardson in March 1854.
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Oxen
hauled building materials across the local marshes, and when the
lighthouse was finished Warren Crowell appropriately became its first
keeper.
The light went into service on April 30, 1855, with a
fifth-order Fresnel lens displaying a fixed white light. The lighthouse
consisted of a two-story, wood-frame dwelling with the lantern mounted
on the roof. |
In 1972 Marion Crowell Ryder painted a vivid picture of the lighthouse’s early years in Cape Cod Remembrances:
The
house stood tall and solid and foursquare, quite a distance back from
the edge of the water. In those days the beach presented a busy scene.
. . . It was lined with fishing dories, moored or drawn up on
the sand, and great piles of long, slender weir poles were stacked here
and there. . . . Atop the sand dunes straggled an uneven line
of small, weather-beaten fish shanties where their owners could store
their gear and warm themselves about battered little stoves in
inclement weather. When we went to the beach as children we never tired
of wandering along the shore, watching the fishermen mending their
nets, setting out for their weirs, or bringing in a shining catch.
. . . The lighthouse itself always dominated the beach with
its purpose and significance.
Warren
Crowell served as keeper until 1863. He was wounded and taken prisoner
in Virginia during the Civil War, and he eventually returned as keeper
in the early 1870s.
Crowell arranged for his wife and nine
children to live in a house on Fisk Street in West Dennis during his
war service. This might have been a welcome change for the children
after being crowded into the small bedrooms of the lighthouse. | 
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Courtesy of the Lighthouse Inn
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Captain James Chase became keeper when Crowell left for the war. His
granddaughter Carrie May Sheridan later remembered seeing ships
anchored offshore while friends and families waited on the West Dennis
Beach for the passengers’ arrival. “Horse-drawn wagons drove into the
shallow water’s edge to take them ashore,” she recalled.
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Courtesy of the Lighthouse Inn
| Another
keeper during the 1860s was Zelotes Wixon of Dennis. Wixon, who was
paid $350 yearly, complained that when he arrived at the lighthouse
expecting to be trained, James Chase was not cooperative. “[He] refused
me all access to the light until the first day of August though I
several times requested permission to look at it and examine the same
in order to fit me for my position and the proper discharge of my
duties,” wrote Wixon.
He also reported that the outgoing keeper was apparently adulterating the oil used in the lighthouse. |
Everything
apparently worked out eventually, as a couple of months later an
inspector stated, “Mr. Wixon is now performing his duty with entire
faithfulness and ability and has been ever since his misfortune in
August last.”
On
August 1, 1880, the lighthouse was discontinued after the lighting
of Stage Harbor Light a few miles to the east, in Chatham. The property
was sold at auction. A newspaper reported that Keeper Crowell returned
"to his former residence where he is having a barn built." William Garfield, a local mariner who was captain of the schooner O. D. Witherall,
was so unhappy about the light being discontinued that he wrote to his
distant relative, the newly elected President James Garfield. "Our
harbor is one of the best there is in the Vineyard Sound," he wrote.
"All vessels come in here in bad weather and no light makes it bad for
large vessels. When you git [sic] to Washington and git everything
working, well then, we shall write you and see if you can do anything
for the Light House." On July 1, 1881, Captain Garfield and his
two daughters were invited to have dinner with the president. After
dinner, the president informed that captain that on that very night,
the light was being resinstated by executive order.
Capt.
Samuel Adams Peak of Hyannis became keeper, remaining until his death
in 1906. Captain Peak had gone to sea as a boy and served as master of
two barks before becoming a lighthouse keeper. His father and
grandfather had also served as lightkeepers in the Hyannis area. After
Peak’s death, Russell Eastman became the station’s final keeper. Marion
Crowell Ryder later described Eastman as “taciturn and unceasingly busy
keeping the lighthouse and its out-buildings in spotless condition.”
The
government deemed the lighthouse unnecessary after the advent of the
Cape Cod Canal. Thanks to the efforts of Congressman Thomas C. Thacher,
a new automatic light was established on the Bass River west jetty at
the entrance to the river. The lighthouse was extinguished on June 15,
1914, and its Fresnel lens was removed. Keeper Eastman was transferred
to Ned’s Point Light in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. The property was soon sold at auction. Harry K. Noyes—of the Noyes
Buick Company in Boston—used it as a summer residence for a while.
Noyes expanded the main house and added several new buildings.
After
Noyes’s death, the property was unoccupied for about five years, until
1938, when it was bought by State Senator Everett Stone and his wife,
Gladys, for $22,000. The Stones began to have overnight guests at the
lighthouse, and their hospitality became so popular that they soon
opened it to the public as the Lighthouse Inn. In 1939 a night’s stay
for two—including three meals— cost $5. | 
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Courtesy of the Lighthouse Inn
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Courtesy of the Lighthouse Inn
| Everett
and Gladys Stone’s son Bob became the first head of the food service
for the inn. Bob Stone hired three waitresses from Wheaton College. One
of them was Mary Packard of Brockton, Massachusetts. Bob and Mary
married in 1942.
Mary Stone later recalled that during World War
II, American planes bombed the rocks near the inn for practice. The
guests would gather on the beach and cheer the show. |
A 1944 hurricane destroyed the dining room and the station’s old oil house, but the Stones continued to expand.
Two
more hurricanes battered the property in 1954, and Hurricane Bob in
1991 sent seawater cascading through the windows of a downstairs lounge
and out through the doors on the opposite side.
The inn lost
power for six days as a result of the storm, but Mary Stone told
the Cape Cod Times. “That was nothing. You should have seen
’44.” |
Hurricanes have plagued the property. Courtesy of the Lighthouse Inn |
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Mary
Stone in May 2001
| Bob
Stone died in October 2004 at the age of 86, but other family members
remain involved with the inn’s operation. There’s a summer staff of
about 90. Bob and Mary’s son Greg is president, and his wife,
Patricia, is the general manager.
For years Greg Stone found
it difficult to return to the inn when coming back from Nantucket or
Martha’s Vineyard. The area’s small navigation lights blended with
other lights on the shore. He convinced the Coast Guard that a
relighted Bass River Lighthouse would provide a needed service to local
boaters. |
In 1989 the Stone family had their lighthouse relighted as a seasonal
aid to navigation, with a 300-millimeter optic providing a white light
that flashes every six seconds. The relighting took place on August 7,
which is National Lighthouse Day (the celebration of the anniversary of
the formation of a national lighthouse service in 1789.)
The light, officially designated the West Dennis Light, now operates each summer. |
Courtesy of the Lighthouse Inn |
Local third graders visiting the lantern at the Lighthouse
Inn in May 2001
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The living room at the Lighthouse
Inn
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The
old 1855 lantern atop the inn got a much-needed overhaul in March 2002.
Marty Nally and Clem Fraize of the Campbell Construction Group of
Beverly, Massachusetts, did the job, which included the installation of
six new panes of heat-resistant glass. The Lighthouse Inn features 700 feet of private beach, with
61 rooms and cottages (with working fireplaces), tennis courts,
cocktail lounge and a waterfront dining room offering a five-course
dinner every evening.
The inn also has a special children's program in the summer,
with a children's director who plans and supervises activities
for the children of guests.
If you stay at the inn, you might also be able to arrange
a tour of the lighthouse and lantern room. |
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For more information, contact:
Post Office Box 128
1 Lighthouse Inn Road
West Dennis, MA 02670
Phone (508) 398-2244
You can read much more about this lighthouse in the book The Lighthouses
of Massachusetts by Jeremy D'Entremont.
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The view from the lantern room
Keepers: (This
list is a work in progress. If you have any information on the keepers
of this lighthouse, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at nelights@gmail.com.
Anyone copying this list onto another web site does so at their own
risk, as the list is always subject to updates and corrections.)
Warren Crowell (1855-1861 and 1870-1880);
James Chase (c.1861-?); Zelotes Wixon (c. 1860s); Samuel Adams
Peak (1881-1906); Russell Eastman (1906-1914)
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