Kittery Historical & Naval Museum

09/06/2026

Six miles off York, Maine there is a bare rock with no soil, no trees and no beach, and the tallest lighthouse in New England is standing on it. 🗼

Boon Island is barely an island. It is a low ledge of wave scoured granite that the ocean washes clean across in a bad storm. The tower that stands there now was lit on the first day of 1855: 133 feet of ashlar granite block, roughly 1,800 tons of stone barged out from a quarry in Biddeford and set by hand, with two vertical rows of seven small windows climbing the shaft and a heavy molded band under the parapet. It was the tallest lighthouse in New England the day it went into service, and it still is.

The reason anyone bothered building there was the wreck of the Nottingham Galley in December 1710. The ship broke apart on that ledge and the survivors spent almost a month on bare rock in the middle of winter with no shelter, no fire and nothing to eat. What the men did at the end of those weeks became one of the ugliest and most bitterly disputed survival stories in New England, and the crew's own accounts contradicted each other for the rest of their lives.

Keepers lived out there with their families for generations, which is its own kind of remarkable when you consider there is nowhere to walk. During the Blizzard of 1978 the sea took the keeper's house off the rock entirely and the two Coast Guardsmen on duty rode the storm out inside the stairwell of the tower. It was automated soon after, and nobody has lived on Boon Island since. ⚓

09/05/2026

08/27/2026

On August 27, 1957, the USS Swordfish SSN 579 was launched from Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The Swordfish was the first nuclear powered sub built here. This was a "Rickover-directed" project. Everyone associated with the SSN 579 reported directly to Rickover, not the Shipyard. Failure to report the smallest incident would result in being fired.

Commissioned in 1957, she headed to Pearl Harbor and became the first nuclear-powered submarine to serve in the Western Pacific.

The Swordfish was decommissioned in 1989.


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08/25/2026

08/20/2026

There is a submarine sitting in a ditch off Route 1 in Portsmouth, and every submarine in the world today owes it something. 🔱

The USS Albacore was built at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and launched in 1953. She carried no torpedoes and never fought anything. Her entire job was to answer one question: what shape should a submarine actually be? Every boat before her was essentially a surface ship that could duck under water for a while. Albacore was designed from scratch to live down there.

What came out of that was the teardrop hull, fat and round at the bow and tapering smoothly aft, closer to a blimp or a dolphin than a ship. It looks fast sitting still on the grass, and it was. She was for a time the fastest submarine in the sea, built to turn, dive and run rather than slug it out. That hull form went straight into the Skipjack class and from there into essentially every American submarine that followed. ⚓

She was decommissioned in 1972 and in 1985 the city hauled her out of the water and into a purpose-dug berth ashore, which is why she now sits in what looks like a very expensive ditch beside the highway. You can walk right through her. The control room is so tight it explains a great deal about what submariners are made of. Albacore Park also keeps a memorial garden for submariners lost at sea.

Have you been aboard her, and did you fit through those hatches any better than the rest of us?

08/13/2026

KCC Lecture: "The Treaty of Portsmouth: Peace at the Navy Yard"
September 16th at 6pm
Register for this free event by calling 207-439-3800 or online: https://secure.rec1.com/ME/kittery-me/catalog?filter=c2VhcmNoPTQxNDE2NzU=