Cape Poge Lighthouse

Cape Poge Light was built in 1802, the second lighthouse on Martha's Vineyard. John Adams, our country's second President, signed the order authorizing a light on the northern tip of Chappaquiddick Island. It was more of a navigation aid to Nantucket mariners than Vineyarders. Even today a keeper and family would find it a remote place in which to live year round. Although it is within easy sight of Edgartown, the shire town of the county, before four-wheel-drive vehicles it could be as much as a full days trip to town and back.

Standing on the extreme northeastern tip of Chappaquiddick Island, Cape Poge Lighthouse, even today, is remote and isolated. In 1801, when the first keeper, Matthew Mayhew, and his family moved into the tiny dwelling provided by a parsimonious Department of the Treasury, it must have seemed as isolated as a frontier outpost. Their enemy was not the "Savage," but the savage sea. Keeper Mayhew felt so insecure that even a quarter of a century later, in 1825, he wrote to Henry Dearborn, Superintendent of Light Houses for Massachusetts: "...