Late afternoon at Edgartown Harbor Light, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The necessity for a lighthouse at this location was precipitated by a large number of vessels frequenting the harbor during the whaling boom of the late 1700s and early 1800s. The original Edgartown Light was a wooden, Cape Cod Style, two-story Keeper's house built on wooden piles, and was destroyed in the Hurricane of 1938. In 1939, the United States Coast Guard installed an 1881 vintage cast-iron tower relocated from Ipswich Rear Range Light. When reconstructed at the mouth of Edgartown Harbor, the relocated conical tower was fitted with a fourth-order Fresnel lens, electrified, and automated.