Fifty-two feet above the water, it flashed a wide beam across the harbor, then a busy shipbuilding, trade and fishing port.

The men who ran it were born seamen.

Edmund Andrews grew up without a mother on Block Island, and worked at a lighthouse there before manning the Wickford light atop a rocky point. In bad weather, he sounded a bell every 20 seconds.

“Now all that sits out there is a pile of rocks,” said Edmund’s great granddaughter, Jo Ann Tarbox, yesterday. “Nobody knows anything about it.”

It won’t be forgotten.

Although the light was torn down in 1930, local model maker Dominic Zachorne is working on a scaled-down replica of the light and an attached eight-room Victorian house. He has used historical scraps - wallpaper swatches, photographs and blueprints - to guide him.

Yesterday he pointed to the 16 tiny windows adorning his half-finished model, which includes wooden clapboards and a thumbprint-sized newspaper atop a miniature desk.

“You could spend a lifetime building this piece,” said Zachorne, who is using both dollhouse and original materials to re-create the Wickford light.

The North Kingstown Arts Council has spent about $8,000 on the model. At a news conference yesterday, New Boston Development Partners announced it would donate $2,500 to the project. The Boston company is building the nearby Gateway complex at Quonset.

“The Wickford Harbor Light served as a beacon for mariners and residents of the village for decades,” said New Boston development director Timothy Chamberlain. The project, he said, “will preserve that vital legacy.”

The model will cost another $3,000 to finish, said Douglas Somers, president of the Arts Council. The council, which is looking for additional money, wants to send the lighthouse to schools as part of a maritime history program, he said.

The Wickford lighthouse was illuminated on Nov. 1, 1882.

Ten days later it helped ships find refuge from a “boisterous easterly gale” with winds up to 50 miles an hour. The keeper and his family lived in the eight rooms next to the light. When the harbor wasn’t frozen, the children had to be rowed 200 feet ashore to attend school. On icy days they walked.

“This project is very dear to my heart,” said Tarbox, whose father was a fisherman. “It is comforting to know that the children and people of North Kingstown will be introduced to the families that inhabited the light.”

pdavis@projo.com / (401) 277-7402