er…that’s the United States Lighthouse Establishment. The Lighthouse Board? Oh, wait a minute, it says here: The United States Bureau of Lighthouses? Ahem, what’s a Coast Guard? Where did that come from?
Don’t give up. From 1789 to 1939 these names were the official agency designations or titles the United States Government gave to the general lighthouse authority for the United States from the time of its creation in 1789.
In the early days of the country, this young lighthouse agency was under the auspices of the Department of the Treasury, and its first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s initial focus was (one) the organization of the department and (two) to pay off the debt accrued by the young nation during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton’s fiscal plan, called the Compromise of 1790, involved the new federal government taking over the states’ debt incurred during the war, which in turn would help establish the new nation’s credit worthiness. It did. In addition, over the next few years all states not only “turned” debts over but also ownership of their lighthouses to the federal government. Thus, the state’s lighthouses, located invariably in the largest harbors of each state proceeded to collect tariffs from ships which harbored, and the tariffs were used to start paying off the nation’s debt.
Starting from its creation in 1789, this new agency was called United States Lighthouse Establishment. In addition, the new nation and its Lighthouse Establishment built its first new lighthouse, Cape Henry Lighthouse in 1791, in Virginia.
During the years of the Lighthouse Establishment under the Treasury Secretary, the nation grew, so too did the number of lighthouses. Between 1789 and 1820 the number of light stations grew to 55. By 1850, we had 100 stations. 1820-1850 saw great growth especially along the Atlantic seaboard and the Great Lakes.
In 1852, frustration fermented serious life-threatening concerns and pleas came regularly from merchants, ship owners, ship captains, ports authorities, harbors masters, and states. Treasury undersecretaries and unqualified bureaucrat/politicians were not only regulating traffic and topographical engineering, which they knew little or nothing about, and lighthouses were being built with serious faults and less than a little forethought. A perfect example is the 1835 Mosquito Inlet Lighthouse fiasco.
Action came in 1852 with the creation of the Lighthouse Board, an agency whose leadership came primarily from U.S. Army Corp of Topographical Engineers, US Navy officers and civilian engineers. This was fortuitous, because in this time frame came the Fresnel lens, caisson lighthouses, kerosene rather than sperm or lard oil, brick giants, lightships, and eventually electricity.
In 1910, the United States had 11,713 aids to navigation. That year, the Congress abolished the Lighthouse Board and created the US Bureau of Lighthouses, placing it under the Department of Commerce. The Bureau then thrived under the almost thirty-year leadership of George Putnam as the Commissioner of US Lighthouses. Navigational aids substantially increased to about 25,000. Electronic aids, radio beacon technology, plus professional training for keepers and technicians, automation, time clock devices, and photo-electric alarm and signal devices came into being.
On July 1, 1939, the Bureau was officially merged with the United States Coast Guard. Some have called this union “cost saving.” In several biographies of President Franklin Roosevelt, scholars saw this as Roosevelt sensing a need to increase the size and scope of his smallest armed service, the Coast Guard, for budgetary reasons.