Instead, on a May night in 2005, the light-keepers vacant house burned to the ground.
Images: Famous lighthouses
Considered suspicious — a fire that some suspect was started by those concerned the building would someday be developed — it instead set the Chebucto Head lighthouse on a perilous heading.
The federal government has now decided to pass over ownership of nearly 1,000 Canadian lighthouses, including the postcard backdrop of Peggys Cove in Nova Scotia.
While it’s believed the provincial government may take over that world-renowned site, it’s the less iconic beacons that may face the greatest peril, including the signal at Chebucto Head, leading to Halifax Harbour.
This, as federal officials defend their decision.
“This process is clearly not about turning off any lights,” says Daniel Breton, director of navigation services for the Canadian Coast Guard.
“It’s about the ownership and management of the lights.”
Krishna Sahay, of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), says it’s simply a continuation of a process started some time ago.
Officials point out that in many cases, modern steel structures can do the job just as well.
So now begins a two year debate over heritage status, who’s able to pay for upkeep and separating — as one official explained — the light from the lighthouse.
Just ten days before the light-keeper’s home at Chebucto Head burned, a group of residents took over a two-year lease. Some in the tiny community of 15 homes, at the core of Duncans Cove, wanted to fundraise to preserve the light. That could have meant opening it up to more visitors. Now, the gate stays locked.
Without the house the nearby beacon was stripped of an important asset, and with federal officials now listing it and others as surplus, their fate is in doubt.
“We just didn’t want it to get into private hands,” says Dominique Gusset, a member of the Chebucto Head Lighthouse Society.
Instead of rugged symbols of Maritime history, she worries about lighthouses being turned into private developments or seaside mansions.
Not that Gusset owns a schooner that needs course correction.
“It’s just a little rowboat,” she explains. “But there’s something comforting about being out on the water…and seeing the light.
“Even hearing that fog horn at night.”
Barry MacDonald, president of the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society, says notice has been served on almost every coastal beacon in Canada.
“It’s a cop-out by DFO,” he fumes, worrying the future of even the best-known watermarks in the country is now in question.
But the course of many of the lighthouses — though perhaps not the lights — may have been charted.
And it’s not away from jagged rocks.
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