Got the notion in 1835, to be specific. That’s the year Barney Hiller sold four acres at Ned’s Point in Mattapoisett to the gummint for $240. You can’t buy one acre in Mattapoisett for $240 nowadays, highlighting just how debased our currency has become. If you’re a loon. The United States Lighthouse Service built a 35 foot tower with a — get this– whale oil lantern on top. Well, it was better than fireflies, I guess.

Mattapoistett is right down the street, er, I mean coast, from New Bedford, so the whale oil lamp no doubt kept many whaling ships from running aground here so they could continue to supply the whale oil lighthouse with oil to keep the light burning to keep the whaling ships from running aground when getting the whale oil to supply the lantern that kept the whale…

I see a pattern developing. See: ethanol.
In 1923 the lighthouse was automated, as the local politicians no doubt ran out of brothers-in-law to live in the keeper’s house. The keeper’s house was floated on a barge across Buzzards Bay to Wing”s Neck in Pocasset that year to house some other jackleg, no doubt.

I thought I had fallen into a kind of Connecticut Yankee reverie and woken up in the Auld Sod when I saw this outbuilding. I half expected Maureen O’Hara to come out and talk of the roses by the door and belt me if she liked me.

The kids just come to Ned’s Point at night to drink their fathers’ beers, maybe cop a feel from a willing girlfriend, and perhaps write their name on the side of the lighthouse from time to time while the local constabulary slumber. Those without enough gumption or sense to have that much fun windsurf here. It’s like sailing but you don’t get as wet as you do when you sail.