LETTERS Wood Island Life-Saving Station: Right Story, Wrong Photo A 2016 notice in the last issue of Sea History about the work of the Wood Island Life-Saving Station Association to restore and reuse the 1908 station in Kittery Maine has been brought to my attention and is greatly appreciated. We continue to work hard towards our goal of a fully restored station open to the public as a maritime museum . Our results from 2016 were exceptional, bur there is still a good deal of work remaining. The article in "Ship Notes, Seaport, and Museum News" had an incorrect photo, however, which we believe may have been the Wood Island Lighthouse in Biddeford, Maine. It is easy to confuse the two-although one is a lighthouse and one a life-saving station. From the shore at Kittery Point, it appears as if Wood Island has both a lighthouse and a life-saving station, when, in fact, they are situated on two neighboring islands at the entrance to the Piscatequa River, with one building for each islandWood Island and Whaleback Ledge. (The Whaleback Light is owned by a different non-profit, the Friends of Portsmouth Harbor Lights, and it, too, is being restored, with plans to open to the public.) Ours is an exciting and ambitious project, which enjoys significant support from the national to the local level. We aim to accurately restore a 1908 life-saving station and open it to the public as a living maritime museum. The building was decommissioned in 1948 and is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a rare "Duluth Type" station, one of just twenty-eight ever built. Only twelve remain nationwide; only one other is restored and open to the public (Old Harbor Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts). Wood Island Station is the only life-saving station in the country with a surviving marine railway that will be fully restored to its original 1907 plans and put back into functional service. The station was nearly razed only a few years ago. Precious little maintenance had been performed for decades, and the Town of Kittery, which owned the property, announced plans to demolish it starting in 2009. Our non-profit, the Wood SEA HISTORY 159, SUMMER 2017
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Wood Island Station in Kittery, October 2016. Island Life-Saving Station Association, was formed to fight the town's demolition plan and provide an alternative. After a sevenyear struggle, we have now secured contracts with the Town to allow for the restoration and reuse. In the summer of2016, approximately $757,000 in federal, state, and private funds were spent on the first phase of the restoration to remove the asbestos within the building and rebuild its crumbling structure ($200,000 from EPA Brownfields program, $200,000 from the National Park Service's Maritime Heritage grants program, $250,000 from the State of M aine,
and approximately $100,000 in private donations). For 2017, we are scrambling to secure additional funding to take on the full restoration of the exterior. We have also applied to the US Department of Defense and their Innovative Readiness Training program (IRT: www.irt.defense.gov) to bring active and reserve military personnel to Wood Island in 2018. It is hoped this program will be able to rebuild the two crumbling sea walls, install a new pier, and rebuild the one-of-a-kind marine railway. In addition to restoring the station's structures, additional plans are underway to build authentic replica rescue craft based
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