WRECKS AND MINOT LIGHT. 47 I 



lift against, so that when the great tide came mounting sev- 

 eral feet higher than usual the giant waves got their shoulders 

 against the house and wrenched it off from the iron pillars, 

 plunging the two men,* lantern and all, into the hissingdeep. 

 The glimmering light had been watched from the shore 

 until far into the* night. The highest tide was at about 

 twelve o'clock midnight, April 16, 1851, and the beacon 

 must have fallen before that, because a bit of the wreck 

 had been given time enough to drift into Sandy Cove, 

 where it was landed at the highest reach of the tide.f 



The failure of this iron structure was an incentive to a 

 less economical Congress to appropriate sufficient money 

 to build a stone tower upon that submerged ledge, and to 

 build it so strongly that the ledge itself must break before 

 the lighthouse will fall. 



There was an interval of five years after the old light- 

 house fell before the first blow was struck upon the ledge 

 for the new one, July i, 1855. The twisted wreck of the old 

 one first had to be cleared away, and much preliminary 

 work had to be done. A description of the process, taken 

 from the " New England Magazine" for October, 1896, is 

 as follows : — 



Captain Barton S. Alexander of the engineer corps was chosen 

 to superintend the construction, and for the various trades em- 

 ployed in the task old Cohasset gave of her trained and tried 

 sons. The very table upon which the plans were drawn was 

 specially constructed, a massive piece of mahogany with a top 

 leveled and squared to a nicety. The building of the model itself 

 occupied the best of two winters, and the old shop still stands 

 near the head of Cohasset Cove where Richard Bourne and Zac- 

 cheus Rich toiled upon this important toy. The scale employed 

 was one inch to the foot, and the model, which was to be seen in 

 the United States Government Building at the Chicago exposition, 

 is stone for stone a counterpart of the granite tower out in the 

 Atlantic. 



* Joseph Wilson and Josepli Antonio. 



t The testimony of Captain Nathaniel Treat. 



