The little lighthouse

Rose Island Light, Narragansett Bay

When I was a child I was very fond of the book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by Lynd Ward (Illustrator) and Hildegarde H. Swift (Author), originally published in 1942. The little red lighthouse on the Hudson was saved by the book and recently was lit again.

The moral of the children's book is that being small doesn't mean you don't matter, but what strikes me about it thinking about it now is that it is also a story of technological progress whose moral is that the obsolete still has its function, it doesn't have to be discarded.

All this came to mind when I visited the lighthouse pictured above, Rose Island light off Newport, Rhode Island. It is now an environmental education center.