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:
“‘But where can we draw water,’
Said Pearse to Connolly,
‘When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There’s nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.’”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)