The Rose Island Light, built in 1870, is located on Rose Island in Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island in the United States. The Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation preserves, maintains and operates the lighthouse.
One of a group of New England lighthouses built to an award-winning design by Vermont architect Albert Dow, the Rose Island Lighthouse has sister lights at Sabin Point, Pomham Rocks, and Colchester Reef.
The building was abandoned as a functioning lighthouse in 1970, when the Newport Bridge was constructed nearby. In 1984, the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation was founded to restore the dilapidated light on behalf of the City of Newport, which had received it for free from the United States government. In 1987, the federal government listed the lighthouse on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1992 it was relit as a private aid to navigation.
The lighthouse is today a travel destination, reached only by boat. For a fee to the Foundation, visitors can spend a night as a guest or a week as the "lighthouse keeper," completing many of the chores required to keep the lighthouse in good condition.
Famous quotes containing the words rose, island and/or light:
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The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)