The Twin Lights of Thacher Island: 250 Years of Unforgettable North Shore History

Long before there was a lighthouse here, there was a shipwreck. The island is named for Anthony Thacher, who survived the sinking of the barque Watch and Wait in the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 by reaching it, a story recorded in the island's history and in Wikipedia's account of Thacher Island.

The storm claimed four of his children and seventeen other lives. Anthony Thacher named the place “Thacher's Woe,” and the island has carried his name ever since. Nearly four centuries later, that loss is still part of what the island means to the people who live in sight of it.

Thacher Island sits in perilous waters where many ships were lost, including, as thacherisland.org describes, near a reef mariners called the “Londoner.” For more than a century, that danger was the island's only story.

Then came the lights. The twin lights were the 11th and final lighthouse built by the British of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first lit on December 21, 1771. According to thacherisland.org and Wikipedia, they were the first lighthouses in the colonies built to mark a dangerous spot rather than a harbor entrance. That decision, to light a hazard rather than a port, made these towers a first in American lighthouse history before the United States even existed.

The towers became part of local life and local language. As Lighthouse Digest records, local people came to call the towers “Anne's Eyes,” and per New England Lighthouses, the two lights have been on Rockport's town seal since 1888.

The towers you see today are not the originals. The current granite towers were completed in 1861 and, according to thacherisland.org and Discover Gloucester, they are the only operating twin lighthouse towers in America. They stand 124 feet tall, with 156 steps to the top, about 164 feet above the waterline, and they can be seen about 22 miles out to sea.

This is the view I think of whenever I look out across the water toward Cape Ann: two identical granite towers rising from the island, still doing the job they have done since 1861.

Life on the island could be unforgiving. Keeper John Farley died in 1891 when he was washed off the island by a wave while performing his duties, as Lighthousefriends recounts. It is a sobering reminder that the same sea that makes these towers beautiful is also the sea that makes them necessary.

Even with Cape Ann lit, the dangers did not end. In the great Portland Gale of 1898, the steamer Portland was claimed with all 176 souls aboard, a grim reminder, as Lighthousefriends notes, of how dangerous these waters could be.

The Twin Lights are more than a landmark to me. They are part of what makes life on Cape Ann feel like life on Cape Ann. They anchor the character of Rockport and Gloucester, two communities shaped by the same sea, and they tell anyone who looks out at them that this is a place where the ocean has always mattered. When I help people buy and sell homes on the North Shore, I often ask what makes a place feel like home. For this part of the coast, the Twin Lights are part of that answer, and I will tell you what I really think: there is no view quite like them.