Kittery Historical & Naval Museum

10/22/2026

10/19/2026

November 11th will be the last day that the museum is open for the season. Stop by and check out the history of Maine’s oldest town.

09/13/2026

09/06/2026

Six miles off York, Maine there is a bare rock with no soil, no trees and no beach, and the tallest lighthouse in New England is standing on it. 🗼

Boon Island is barely an island. It is a low ledge of wave scoured granite that the ocean washes clean across in a bad storm. The tower that stands there now was lit on the first day of 1855: 133 feet of ashlar granite block, roughly 1,800 tons of stone barged out from a quarry in Biddeford and set by hand, with two vertical rows of seven small windows climbing the shaft and a heavy molded band under the parapet. It was the tallest lighthouse in New England the day it went into service, and it still is.

The reason anyone bothered building there was the wreck of the Nottingham Galley in December 1710. The ship broke apart on that ledge and the survivors spent almost a month on bare rock in the middle of winter with no shelter, no fire and nothing to eat. What the men did at the end of those weeks became one of the ugliest and most bitterly disputed survival stories in New England, and the crew's own accounts contradicted each other for the rest of their lives.

Keepers lived out there with their families for generations, which is its own kind of remarkable when you consider there is nowhere to walk. During the Blizzard of 1978 the sea took the keeper's house off the rock entirely and the two Coast Guardsmen on duty rode the storm out inside the stairwell of the tower. It was automated soon after, and nobody has lived on Boon Island since. ⚓

08/27/2026

On August 27, 1957, the USS Swordfish SSN 579 was launched from Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The Swordfish was the first nuclear powered sub built here. This was a "Rickover-directed" project. Everyone associated with the SSN 579 reported directly to Rickover, not the Shipyard. Failure to report the smallest incident would result in being fired.

Commissioned in 1957, she headed to Pearl Harbor and became the first nuclear-powered submarine to serve in the Western Pacific.

The Swordfish was decommissioned in 1989.


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