Lighthouse Keeper’s House | House for Sale

Note: This piece was originally published in our September/October 2019 issue and may contain outdated details. As of April 2023, the house has been placed back on the market. Please consult the listing for updated information. Yankee likes to mosey around and see, out of editorial curiosity, what you can turn up when you go house hunting. We have no stake in the sale whatsoever and would decline it if offered. 

Stay awhile on Isle au Haut, and your relationship with time will change.

There is something that feels essential, eternal, about this island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. As I stand on the steps of the keeper’s house at Robinson Point Light, looking toward the rocky shore, the white brick lighthouse, and the blue water of the Atlantic beyond, it’s hard to remember that I have bills to pay or stories to write.

Time passes slowly here, but somehow all history seems recent. The view I’m gazing on is little changed since 1604, when the island’s trio of small mountains led French explorer Samuel Champlain to dub this Isle au Haut (“High Island”). The graceful keeper’s house that I’ve come to see feels like a new arrival, having witnessed only the most recent 112 years of the island’s history.

The lighthouse station on Robinson Point was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the summer of 1907. Comprising the keeper’s house, the lighthouse tower, a small post-and-beam barn, and a boathouse, it was the last full lighthouse station to be built in Maine.

“The person who moves here isn’t just buying an amazing and unique property,” Realtor Jamie O’Keefe had told me as we were motoring toward the island on the twice-daily mail boat. “Island life is its own thing. It isn’t for everyone, and I don’t think you can compare it to anything else.”

In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, belt-tightening led to the shuttering of Isle au Haut’s lighthouse station. The keeper and his family moved back to the mainland, and the lighthouse was fitted with a battery-powered beacon.

In the years that followed, much of the property was sold back to the heirs of the Robinson family, the original landowners. The federal government owned the lighthouse itself until 1998, when the town of Isle au Haut took stewardship of it.

In 1985, Jeff and Judi Burke saw the keeper’s house for the first time. As the proprietors of the Little River Inn in Pemaquid, Maine, they recognized its potential—or at least Jeff did. He recounts the moment in his 2017 book, The Lighthouse & Me:

I simply couldn’t figure out why all these normally sane people (including my usually rational wife) couldn’t see the guaranteed success of my scheme to create an inn at the old Isle au Haut lighthouse station. Sure, it was an isolated place, devoid of electricity and running water (hence, no bathrooms, not even a place to wash your feet), without a road to access the place nor a safe spot to land a boat. And it had only three rooms. And the islanders detested the tourism threat. And, yes, it would be an outrageously expensive undertaking—and we hardly had a cent.…

In 1986, the Burkes moved in with their youngest son and their dog. When they arrived, water for the kitchen was hand-pumped from a rainwater cistern that filled half the basement. The sewage system was even more basic, consisting of a bucket in an outhouse behind the woodshed. This was just part of what promised to be a daunting challenge, Jeff recalls:

[We’d have to] build a half-mile road and a boat landing, create a sewage disposal system, bring in electricity and plumbing, renovate all the old buildings, and install a commercial kitchen. And then we needed to develop a marketing plan and train a cadre of hospitality professionals, an overwhelming project requiring years to launch. Two months later we opened.

Initially, the Keeper’s House Inn offered an aggressively rustic experience. Guests would hike in, usually with backpacks. There was a makeshift shower in the woods. Water was hauled from the well at a nearby farm. The outhouse remained the only bathroom.

The Burkes improved the property over the next 27 years, helping it gain a reputation as one of the most unusual and beautiful small inns in New England. Today the main house has four bedrooms—all with spectacular ocean views—as well as two bathrooms and an updated kitchen outfitted with a pair of stoves and an industrial refrigerator. The woodshed has been converted into a two-bedroom guesthouse; two other outbuildings are now sleeping cottages.

Although the property remains off the grid, there is electricity, courtesy of solar panels and a generator. The cistern has given way to a reverse-osmosis filtering system that makes seawater drinkable. The indoor plumbing drains to a sewage disposal system that utilizes beds of peat moss and other natural systems to process waste.

When the Burkes eventually decided to retire, Marshall Chapman stepped up to continue what they had started. A geology professor at Morehead State University in Kentucky, he had been a graduate student when he first came to Isle au Haut to study the island’s geology. It was love at first sight. “The island will slow you down and teach you patience,” he says. “It is geologically interesting—and the sunsets are amazing.”

After buying the inn in 2013, Chapman would return to the island every year in mid-May and stay until August. “Being an innkeeper and a college professor was a lot to juggle, but I had a wonderful chef and a general manager who made it all possible,” he says.

Chapman’s growing responsibilities at the college, though, forced a tough decision. “I’ve loved having this in my life, but I can’t give it the time it deserves,” he says. “I’m not letting go of Isle au Haut, but I have to let the keeper’s house go.”

Although he isn’t placing restrictions on how buyers must use the keeper’s house, Chapman would love to see it reopen as an inn. In any case, the new owners should be prepared for visitors.

“This is probably the prettiest two acres on the island, and this property has always been open [to the public],” says Chapman. “The lighthouse is iconic, and people love to see it. I hope the new owners will feel the same dedication to sharing it that past owners have.”

Including the main house, the guesthouse, two sleeping cabins, a boathouse, and a deepwater dock, this property is listed at $1,695,000. For more information, contact Jamie O’Keefe at LandVest Real Estate at 207-299-8732 or see the listing at landvest.com.

Joe Bills

Former associate editor Joe Bills is the co-owner of Escape Hatch Books in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. After nearly a decade of fact-checking, responding to readers, and writing several articles for Yankee, he now brings his expertise to our sister publication The Old Farmer's Almanac.

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