What prettier bit of scenery on the coast of Maine than Little River, with its small town at the head of harbor, and its tree-fringed rocks bordering its shores?

-- Mary Bradford Crowninshield, All Among the Lighthouses, 1886.

Cutler Harbor, spring 2000

The first Little River Lighthouse

U.S. Coast Guard

Cutler, on Maine's rugged "Bold Coast," is a town of under 800 residents with a still active fishing fleet and a picturesque and unspoiled waterfront. As trade, shipbuilding, and the fishing industry grew in Cutler Harbor, Little River Light was established in 1847 on Little River Island at the harbor's entrance.

The harbor is the last protected harbor on the Maine coast before Canada.

A stone keeper's house was also built, attached to the stone lighthouse tower. The original lamps and reflectors were replaced by a fifth-order Fresnel lens in 1855.

In 1876, the lighthouse was rebuilt. The 41-foot cast-iron tower, lined with brick, still stands. The old dwelling remained standing, but the top part of the old attatched tower was removed. The present Victorian wood-frame house was built in 1888 and the original dwelling was removed.

Little River Island is a short distance from the mainland, which made the light a much sought-after assignment for keepers. The station also offered a beautiful view across to Canada's Grand Manan Island. The lights of three Canadian lighthouses can be seen from Little River Island.

Little River Light was always a single family station. Neil Corbett, a retired lobster dealer in Cutler, grew up on Little River Island, where his father Willie Corbett was keeper for 17 years. The Corbetts kept a cow, pigs and chickens on the island, a common practice at family lighthouse stations. Keeper Corbett was an excellent fiddler and sometimes left the island on Saturday nights to play at dances at the lifesaving station at Cross Island down the coast.

U.S. Coast Guard

The 1876 lighthouse tower with the old keeper's house. Notice the truncated 1847 tower at the right end of the keeper's house. U.S. Coast Guard photo.

Neil Corbett helped wind the clockwork mechanisms that turned the light and sounded the fog bell. Both mechanisms required winding every few hours. One July there were 525 hours of fog -- "Golly, that was a lot of work!" Corbett told Christopher Little, author of The Rockbound Coast.

Neil Corbett's sister, Ruth Farris, was a popular resident of Cutler who wrote a column for many years for the Machias Valley News Observer. She was affectionately known as "Mother Nature." "We always had a good time," Ruth said to Yankee Magazine about her childhood on Little River Island. Ruth Farris died in 1997 and a tablet in her memory stands near an old fog bell on Cutler's main street.

The book Anchor to Windward by Edwin Valentine Mitchell described a visit of the vessel Sunbeam to Little River Island circa 1939, when Willie Corbett was keeper. The Sunbeam visited lighthouses and other locations along the coast on behalf of the Maine Seacoast Mission, bringing literature and supplies to people in remote places.

When the Sunbeam had passed Machias Bay and Little Machias Bay and saluted Little River Light at the entrance to almost the last harbor of refuge on the southern seacoast of Maine, a young girl ran down the boardwalk to the white wooden pyramid on which the fog bell hung -- three blasts of the whistle followed by three strokes of the bell, then one blast of the whistle and one stroke of the bell .

From "Stebbins Illustrated Coast Pilot," 1902. The lighthouse was painted brown for a time.

Mr. Corbett, the keeper, came down onto the shingle in his rubber boots and waded into the water to catch the bow of the skiff. Then when we had landed we all dragged the boat high up on the beach . . . Here we were greeted by Mrs. Corbett and the girl who had rung the bell. The girl was the youngest of eight children and the only one left at home. She told me that the large, yellow, long-haired cat, Teaser, had caught all the rabbits on the island. The Corbetts, who had been at Little River for 17 years, once kept a cow on the island, but the animal was no good after it drank three gallons of kerosene. When I asked Mr. Corbett what kind of winter it had been at Little River, he said it had been a good one. Only one day at zero, and no bad storms. It was five or six degrees warmer at the light than up town in Cutler, he said.

The 1876 tower and the 1888 keeper's house

He took me up in the light tower, from which I could see Grand Manan at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy . . . On the southwestern headland, fourteen miles from Little River, is a lighthouse, and beyond it, out in the water, there is another light on the notorious Gannet Rock. Both lights are visible from Little River.

U.S. Coast Guard photo

Neil Corbett, son of Keeper Willie Corbett, in 2001. A World War II veteran and inductee in the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame, he died in January 2008.

In January 1948, the keeper of Little River Light told the Maine Coast Fisherman that a "big, red fox walked up to our front door this fall, no doubt searching for our two newly acquired kittens..." He also reported, "At this writing we have twelve inches of snow and about every day the wind blows a gale."

Cutler became an important coastal defense site in 1960. Two 1,000-foot communications towers were erected at the town's naval base. The towers are used by the Navy to communicate with the fleet in the North Atlantic, Europe and the Arctic.

Little River Light was a three-man station under the Coast Guard until July 23, 1973, when orders were given to change the station to a one-man family station due to a shortage of Coast Guardsmen needed for other projects. In 1975, the Fresnel lens was removed and the lighthouse was replaced by an automatic light on a nearby skeleton tower. In 1981, a rotating DCB-10 aerobeacon was replaced by a flashing 300 mm optic.