Long Point Lighthouse at Cape Cod National Seashore

See the Lighthouses web page for an interactive location map.

When a lighthouse was first erected on the Long Point Peninsula in 1827, there was already a salt works and fishing village. Lightkeepers and their families had to endure the awful smell and abundant flies all the way through the 1870s, by which time most residents had left for Provincetown. The light warned sailors of a sandbar that extended a quarter mile from the tip of the peninsula towards Cape Cod Bay. Erosion was always a problem on Long Point, and by 1874 the lighthouse was poised to fall into the sea.

A new lighthouse was constructed out of harms way in 1875, and this is the lighthouse now standing. A lightkeeper’s house was attached to the structure until it was torn down some time after 1952 when the light was automated and a lightkeeper was no longer needed. Since 1981 it has operated on solar power. The light still functions today, though with modern technology it shines more for historic, tourist, and esthetic purposes than it does for navigation.

Long Point Lighthouse at Cape Cod National Seashore

An oil house from 1904 still stands, and nearly as prominent as the lighthouse itself is a cross atop a nearby sand dune. This is dedicated to Charles S. Darby, a man killed during World War II. Darby was a member of a Provincetown group of artists known as the Beachcombers, and it was this group that erected the cross in his honor in 1946. The cross was originally on the lawn of the Art Association; it was moved to its present location on Long Point in 1960. This is not a grave. Darby is buried in the Cambridge American Cemetery in England. By coincidence, the first lightkeeper at Long Point was a man named Charles Derby.