NAUSET LIGHT

An updated edition of the diary of a fabled light station's caretaker.

Mary Daubenspeck, for years the owner of Cape Cod’s iconic Nauset Light Keeper’s House and caretaker of the Light Station, died in 2001 after having negotiated the survival of these historic landmarks and their transfer to the Cape Cod National Seashore (CCNS) and the Nauset Light Preservation Society. In these pages, her brother Tim presents both the diary that she kept from the time she and her husband purchased the Keeper’s House in 1982 until her death and the diary’s extensions that bring the story to 2024, when the Daubenspeck family left their private residence and turned over the properties to the CCNS (it’s a version of a personal journal, in other words, that includes the author’s obituary). Mary Daubenspeck shepherded her family’s home through good times and bad, including, most notably, the onslaught of the Atlantic Ocean, which led to the lighthouse being moved inland some distance in November of 1996. Through 200 pages filled with color photos of the lighthouse and the Keeper’s House, readers follow Mary Daubenspeck’s journal entries as she delights in family, deals with bureaucracy, and keeps one eye on the increasingly raucous forces of nature. In fact, several of her most enjoyable entries revolve in large part around nature, whether she’s noticing the “icy velvet black sky” at night or reflecting on the incessant pounding of the surf. Naturally, the book’s chief preoccupation (perhaps to the reader’s detriment) is the author’s obsession with passing her land on to responsible new hands. “I will make myself into anything (curator, concessioner, etc.) I have to in order to keep my house in my family’s rightful private ownership,” she writes in October of 1996. “Anything, that is, but a fool.” The author’s flinty personality memorably fills these pages.

An engrossing and historically invaluable record of the end of Nauset Light Keeper’s House’s private ownership.