President Thomas Jefferson signed the order to build the lighthouse at West Quoddy Head in Lubec, Maine, in 1806. Rebuilt in 1858, and still standing on the easternmost point of mainland United States, the lighthouse’s beacon, now automated, can be seen some 18 miles out to sea. Painted in alternating 25-inch-wide red-and-white stripes, this colorful 49-foot-high brick building has long been a popular subject for calendars and postcards sold along Maine’s northern coast.

In fact, just such a Kodachrome postcard from the 1950s, titled “West Quoddy Light,” can be found tucked away in an archival box at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Behring Center, along with a large selection of other lighthouse postcards. Donated to the Smithsonian decades ago by a hobbyist collector, the postcards depict lighthouses in 25 states and Canada.

The collection is maintained as a research tool by the museum’s Division of Engineering, says Jeffrey Stine, chair of the Division of Work and Industry. “Documenting large engineering projects, such as dams, bridges, tunnels and lighthouses, is a special challenge for a museum curator. We cannot go out and collect these objects, so we collect models, drawings, photographs, postcards and other items that tell their histories.”

Studying the cards, Stine says, “can lend insight to such questions as: What did these lighthouses and their seascapes and harbors look like 50 to 100 years ago? What materials were used in their construction? How did lighthouse architecture vary from region to region?”

Going online
Today, thanks to the work and dedication of volunteer curator Morton Goldman, this unusual collection has been liberated from its cardboard storage box and made accessible to all at the Web site americanhistory.si.edu/collections/lighthouses.

To navigate the site, visitors can click lighthouse icons on coastal maps, browse regional or state lists of lighthouses or scroll down a list of lighthouse names. Each postcard has its own page, with a front and back view of the card, along with such information as height, year built and, for active lighthouses, the beacon’s flash sequence. West Quoddy Head’s light, for example, flashes around the clock in the sequence two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, nine seconds off.

Nautical charts
A former avocational sailor who once piloted his 30-foot sloop around the Chesapeake Bay and sailed chartered sailboats in the Caribbean, Goldman knows lighthouses as aids to navigation, not just as subjects for seaside vistas. In creating the Web site, he worked closely with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which contributed customized nautical charts that pinpoint the location of each lighthouse and its surroundings.

“My purpose was to give the landlubber a view of how lighthouses were used by sailors, in conjunction with charts, to find out where they were and where they needed to go,” Goldman explains.

Goldman’s work for the postcard Web site required months of research into the history of the 272 lighthouses it features. “There are lots of lighthouse books that have small errors that get perpetuated,” says Stine, the project’s director. “Mort’s cross-referencing and use of data were really quite sophisticated and detailed.”

Goldman frequently sought help—e-mailing questions along with pictures of postcards—from the large community of lighthouse history buffs and preservationists around the country. He also scoured the Internet for Web pages and books to add to the site that offered additional details, photographs and histories of specific lighthouses.

In addition, the Web site holds the potential of expanding to include images and information about the many other lighthouse artifacts in the Smithsonian’s collection. These include Fresnel lenses (invented in 1822 by Frenchman Augustin Fresnel, the lens produced a much brighter light than the reflectors then being used), old lighthouse lamps and the tools used to maintain them, and even uniforms worn by lighthouse keepers.

Postcard dating
For a historian, handwritten dates and postmarks on a postcard can help determine when the photograph on its front was taken. Yet only a handful of the cards in the Smithsonian lighthouse postcard collection were ever used for correspondence, making dating them a challenge.

To assign periods to the undated cards in the collection, Goldman had to acquaint himself with a dating system long used by deltiologists, or postcard collectors. Cards with divided backs, for example—the left side devoted to correspondence and the right to stamp and address—belong to the Divided Back Era, which began in 1907. Photochrome postcards, using new color printing technology, first first appeared in 1939.

“This online exhibit testifies to the critical role played by volunteers in the work of the Smithsonian,” Stine says. “The depth of research that Mort put into this project is extraordinary.”

Having spent a great deal of time in New England as a student and researcher—“everywhere you looked, there were lighthouses”—it came as a surprise to Goldman that the state containing the most lighthouses is neither Maine nor Massachusetts. Bordered by three of the Great Lakes, Michigan has the most lighthouses.