Collections

Lighthouse

Shelburne Museum’s Lighthouse originally guided mariners past treacherous shoals in Lake Champlain. Today it is a welcoming sanctuary near the center of the Museum’s campus, the perfect place to pause and take in the view.

Visitors to the Lighthouse can also learn about Lake Champlain history and daily nineteenth-century life on the lake. Originally sited on Lake Champlain’s Colchester Reef, it served as a home and workplace for eleven successive lighthouse keepers and their families.

The Lighthouse was built in 1871 to mark three reefs between Vermont and New York. Because it had to endure strong lake winds, it is solidly built with a post-and-beam frame and one-and-a-half-inch thick iron rods. In 1952, the abandoned Lighthouse was dismantled from its site on the lake and re-constructed at the Museum, where it sits near the 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga.