Grand Harbour Lighthouse

This place is on private property. Listing for informational purposes only. Please do not visit without express permission from the land owner. The first permanent settlement in the Grand Manan Archipelago took place on tiny Ross Island, which is connected to the larger Grand Manan Island at low tide. Moses Gerrish led a group of fifty United Empire Loyalist families to the land on the eastern side of Grand Harbour in 1784 and named it Ross Island, in honor of Thomas Ross, a fellow settler, who had been a mariner at Falmouth, Maine and entered the West Indies trade after arriving on Grand Manan. Grand Harbour Lighthouse consists of a square, wooden tower, thirty-two-feet-high, with an attached keeper’s dwelling. A fixed-white, catoptric light was originally shown at a focal plane of forty feet and could be seen in clear weather at a distance of eleven miles. Harry Mc Dowell was the longest-serving keeper at Grand Harbour Lighthouse. He and his wife Sadie arrived in 1914 and left in 1948 after raising nine children at the lighthouse. The couple had three children before moving to Ross Island, but the other six, starting with Elliot in 1915 and finishing with Alice in 1933, were born at the lighthouse. The McDowell children had many happy memories of growing up at the lighthouse, but having to walk to Grand Harbour to attend school might not have been amongst them. A powerful storm on February 2, 1976, known as the Groundhog Day Gale, just happened to coincide with abnormally high tides caused by the Saros cycle. (The Saros cycle repeats every 18.03 years and has to do with the alignment of the sun, moon, and earth.) The high tides coupled with strong winds wreaked havoc on coastal communities in southern New Brunswick, and Grand Harbour Lighthouse received significant damage.