Abbie Burgess
Matinicus Rock Light Station, 1894. Photo: Library of Congress
When the Burgess family moved to Matinicus Rock in 1853 so that Samuel could be the lighthouse keeper at the remote outpost, there was a new keeper’s house next to the twin lighthouse towers. The previous one was rubble, destroyed in a storm.
Call it foreboding, but the knowledge of that destructive storm weighed on Abbie Burgess, Samuel’s teenaged daughter, who took care of her ill mother and younger sisters as well as acting as her father’s assistant so that he and her brother could fish. Worried that her ailing mother would not be able to move quickly from the keeper’s house to the towers in a storm, in December 1855, Abbie persuaded her mother to move into one of them.
In January 1856, what the U.S. Coast Guard later called one of the two most destructive 19th-century storms to strike Matinicus Rock blew in. Abbie’s father and brother were off-island when the waves got higher and higher and the wind more ferocious. As the sea swept over the Matinicus Rock, Abbie and her family sheltered in one of the towers, Abbie only making a mad dash outside once, to gather as many of their chickens as she could. Soon after, waves swept the remainder of the old keeper’s house and everything else that was movable into the ocean.
The storm raged for four days but continued bad weather and rough seas kept her father and anyone else from reaching Matinicus Rock for a month. While the Burgess family huddled inside the granite tower, Abbie kept the oil lamps lit in the towers and did so until her father finally returned.
When her father’s posting to the lighthouse ended in 1861, Abbie stayed on to assist the new keeper, John Grant, and his family. She eventually married one of the Grant sons and stayed on Matinicus Rock as an assistant lighthouse keeper until 1875.
Abbie’s actions in January 1856 became one of the best-known stories in American lighthouse history, with her heroic efforts retold in newspapers and magazines, and, in the 1980s, a children’s book, Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie.
Abbie Burgess Grant died in 1892, just two years after retiring from the lighthouse keeping service. She is buried in a cemetery in South Thomaston, where a maritime historian placed a lighthouse-shaped memorial in 1945.
Author: Stephanie Bouchard
