Stonington Point village lighthouse
— the small granite light that became the keeper of the village's record.
Not only on a wall.
Stonington Point village lighthouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The granite lighthouse at the end of Water Street, built in 1840 to replace an earlier tower the sea was eating. It went dark in 1889 when the breakwater light took over. Since 1927 the Stonington Historical Society has kept it as a museum, one of the first lighthouse museums in the country. From the tower the village reads as one long spine of rooftops between two harbours.
The place, in three passes.
The Old Stonington Harbor Light sits at Stonington Point, the southern tip of the borough's half-mile peninsula in southeastern Connecticut. The current granite tower was built in 1840, replacing an 1823 wood-and-stone structure that erosion had begun to undermine. The light is 35 feet tall, attached to a stone keeper's house, and faces directly south across Fishers Island Sound toward Watch Hill, Rhode Island. The point itself is a small public lawn at the foot of Water Street.
The tower and keeper's house are built of locally quarried granite, the same stone that walls many of the borough's older buildings. The shape is octagonal, a common New England lighthouse plan of the period, and the lantern room originally held a sixth-order Fresnel lens. The structure was decommissioned in 1889 when a new automated light went up on the outer breakwater, leaving the granite tower without a working purpose for nearly forty years.
The lighthouse has been the Old Lighthouse Museum since 1927, run by the Stonington Historical Society and among the earliest lighthouse museums in the United States. It is open seasonally, generally May through October, with a modest admission. The climb to the lantern room is by ladder and not suitable for very small children. The point is reached on foot from Cannon Square, about a ten-minute walk down Water Street through the village.
