Digital Extra

 Ida Lewis (1842-1911)
The keeper of the Lime Rock light

  By ELIZABETH ABBOTT
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

It was a warm, calm September day in 1859, when four Newport schoolboys decided to go for a leisurely sail. They made it to the Dumplings and back safely, but once inside Newport harbor, the high jinks began.

One of the boys climbed the mast of the small sailboat and began to rock away. The boat capsized, sending the boys, splashing, into the harbor. They surely would have drowned but for the intercession of Ida Lewis.

Lewis saw the boat overturn from Lime Rock lighthouse, where her father was the keeper. She was only 17, but that didn't stop her from launching a rowboat and pulling the boys aboard.

Back at Lime Rock, Ida served the soaked and shivering boys "a stiff dose of hot molasses" and otherwise cared for them until their families arrived.

Thus began an extraordinary career.

Lewis saved at least 18 people -- some say more -- from the waters off Newport. Many times she ventured out in her rowboat alone, in the freezing cold, risking her life to pull others to safety. All the while, she distinguished herself as one of the nation's first female lighthouse keepers.

"She has worked out the problem of woman's rights in a different manner," Col. Thomas Higginson said in 1869 when the residents of Newport presented her with a rowboat called Rescue.

"She has been accustomed to assuming the right of helping her fellow-man without asking any questions," Higginson said.

Idawalley Zorada Lewis was born in Newport on Feb. 25, 1842, in a small wooden house at Spring and Brewer Streets. She was the second of four children of Captain Hosea Lewis, who was originally from Hingham, Mass., and Idawalley Zorada (Willey) Lewis, the daughter of a Block Island doctor.

Captain Lewis was appointed keeper of the Lime Rock light in the early 1850s. At that time, Lime Rock was merely a collection of boulders with a small shed on it. (It is where the Ida Lewis Yacht Club now stands.) Captain Lewis rowed out to Lime Rock twice a day to light and extinguish the kerosene beacon.

In the mid-1850s, a house was built on Lime Rock for Captain Lewis and his family, but shortly thereafter he suffered a stroke that left him unable to work. The duties of lightkeeper fell to his wife, and eventually to Ida, who was officially appointed keeper of the light in 1887.

In 1870 or thereabouts, Lewis married William H. Wilson of Connecticut. But she left Connecticut -- and her marriage -- after a few months to return to Lime Rock, where she led, by all accounts, a fastidious life.

By the time she died in 1911, at the age of 69, her daring rescues were reported around the globe and the somewhat taciturn Lewis had become a reluctant cause celebre.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant asked to meet Lewis on a visit to Newport. Other notable personalities, who made the trip out to Lime Rock by rowboat to pay homage to her, included Mrs. William Astor, financier Jim Fisk and robber baron Jay Gould, who presented Ida with a pair of gold oarlocks.

"It is estimated that over ten thousand people called on Miss Lewis last summer," the June 20, 1870, edition of the Boston Journal reported.

"People would land at the rock, prowl over the house, quiz the family, pry into the household affairs, patronizingly ask the age of each person and what they lived on, and how they felt when Ida was saving souls," the newspaper reported.

Source: The Newport Historical Society. Note: Ida Lewis' rowboat "Rescue" is on display at Newport's Museum of Yachting at Fort Adams. The beacon from her lighthouse can be seen at the new Museum of Newport History at the Brick Market.

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