George Washington signed the order, and Portland Head Light went into service on 10 January 1791 — the first lighthouse completed under the authority of the United States government. The tower still stands on the headland at Cape Elizabeth.
That fact explains why so many travellers who begin by researching Bar Harbor Maine Lighthouse Boat Tours end up reading charts of Casco Bay instead, some three hours southwest along the same coastline.
Casco Bay is a working harbour before it is a scenic one. Its shipping channel is marked by towers built across a century of federal appropriations. Portland Breakwater Light, cast in iron in 1875 and modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, is known locally as Bug Light. Spring Point Ledge Light, lit in 1897, is a caisson tower planted on a submerged shelf that had been wrecking coasting schooners for decades. Ram Island Ledge Light, granite and squat, followed in 1905 on rock that shows only at low water. Halfway Rock Light of 1871 sits ten miles offshore and was long considered the loneliest station in Maine. A single Casco Bay lighthouse cruise passes most of them.
The water between them is called the Calendar Islands, a seventeenth-century flourish claiming as many islands as there are days in the year. The true count is smaller — a few hundred ledges, islets and inhabited islands — but the name survives, and it describes the navigational problem the lights were built to solve. Set among them is Fort Gorges, a granite hexagon raised on Hog Island Ledge between 1858 and 1864, obsolete before its masons finished and never once fired upon. Visitors arrive asking about Bar Harbor Maine Lighthouse Boat Tours tours and leave able to name six lit stations on one bay.
The departure point carries its own history. The terminal at 56 Commercial Street occupies a waterfront that has dispatched island ferries since the middle of the nineteenth century, and the same berths still serve mail, freight and year-round island residents. Sightseeing sailings share those docks with commuters. For the traveller, the phrase Bar Harbor Maine Lighthouse Boat Tours tickets resolves, in practice, into passage aboard a working Portland Harbor lighthouse cruise — past a coastline whose Fresnel lenses, fog signals and keepers' quarters were engineered for commerce rather than scenery, and which remain, two centuries on, active aids to navigation.
1 hr 45 min
