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Genevieve “Jenny” Purington, the daughter of lighthouse keeper John Purington and his wife Ellen, was just four years old when she arrived on Little Nash Island off the coast of South Addison, Maine where her father became the lighthouse keeper in 1916. The Purington family was no strangers to island lighthouse life; they had lived at three other offshore Maine lighthouses by the time John Purington was appointed keeper of the Nash Island Lighthouse.
To supplement the family’s food supply and income, the Purington family raised chickens, turkeys, pigs, and sheep on the island. They also had a cow for milk and maintained a number of lobster traps. In later years, Jenny recalled that as children they would hitch up the sheep to carts and also ride them like horses. They even used them to haul coal and firewood up to the house from the boathouse.
Little could Jenny Purington have ever imagined in those early childhood years that Little Nash Island would remain an integral part of the rest of her life. Jenny was part of a family of nine children who grew up on the island, where she would live until January 14, 1934 when she got married to Stanley Cirone. But Jenny’s sheep on the island were hers, and they remained near and dear to her heart. The sheep’s wool was a good and regular source of income that supplemented her and her husband’s lobster fishing business. Her sheep’s wool was well known for its fog-washed cleanliness.
Jenny Cirone, as she was now known, was also a smart business woman. When her father retired from the Lighthouse Service in 1935, she began to buy as much land on Little Nash Island and Big Nash Island as she could that was not owned by the government so that her sheep could always remain there to roam and graze free. Jenny checked on the sheep often, especially during the birthing season and, of course, she came out to shear the sheep when the time was right.
Jenny Cirone was a popular and well-liked person of the community. Even though other keeper families lived at the lighthouse after Jenny and her family did, after automation and the removal of the last keeper, locals continued to affectionately refer to it as “Jenny’s Light.”
After the last keeper was removed from Nash Island Lighthouse, the Coast Guard, apparently, did not know what to do with the now empty and abandoned keeper’s house. So, in 1947, the decision was made to burn the keeper’s house, the fog bell tower, boat house, and the boat ramps.
Although Jenny was upset about the orders to burn the house that she grew up in, she was more upset that the fire could spread across the island and burn all her pasture land needed to feed her sheep, which could destroy part of her and her husband’s livelihood. When she complained to the officer in charge that she was worried that the fire, especially in the windy conditions of the day, would spread over the island, he told her that it was of no concern to him. When she told him that she owned most of the island, he did not believe her. Later in life, Jenny Cirone stated, “That’s the only time in my life that I felt like hurting someone.”
After the Coast Guard’s on-site officer in charge felt that the fire was well underway in burning the house and other buildings to ashes, he ordered his crew back to the work boat to depart the area. Jenny Cirone was now even more furious.
In an attempt to get satisfaction, she started first by calling the local Coast Guard base, then the Coast Guard in South Portland, and finally the Coast Guard Admiral in Boston, who immediately gave the orders that dispatched the USCG cutter Snohomish to the island along with two other Coast Guard vessels to fight the fire that was by then spreading over the island. Vernon Fash, one of the crewmen of the Snohomish recalled later that he didn’t think that they would ever get the fire out because the peat just kept burning and burning. He said, “I shall never forget it, because it burned for days and needless to say we worked long hours and finally extinguished it.”
One of the men assigned to the project of burning the buildings at Nash Island Lighthouse was Kenneth E. Jarvis (1903-1991), a long time civilian employee who worked out of the Coast Guard’s carpenter shop in South Portland, Maine from the 1940s to 1963. Fortunately, Kenneth Jarvis always travelled with his Brownie box camera, and he had the foresight to take some photographs that would document the end of this era in lighthouse history at Nash Island Lighthouse. Thanks to his grandson, Wayne Jarvis, we are now able to publish these photos of the burning of the buildings at Nash Island Lighthouse that have now been saved for future generations.
To learn more about Nash Island Lighthouse and see photos of the keepers and family members who lived there, you can order the book Lighthouses of the Sunrise County that is available for $9.99, plus shipping, as item #120 from Lighthouse Digest, P.O. Box 250, East Machias, ME 04630 or on line at www.LighthouseDigest.com or call 207-259-2121.
This story appeared in the
May/Jun 2019 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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