Palmers Island Lighthouse, New Bedford, Massachusetts, circa 1910

About this postcard

The card pictures Palmer's Island Light, a conical whitewashed stone tower with a dark lantern room and gallery railing, standing on a small grassy island at the mouth of New Bedford Harbor; a low stone seawall and breakwater run off to the left, with the city waterfront and rooftops visible along the horizon at sunset. The light guided vessels into New Bedford, long one of New England's leading whaling and fishing ports, and the granite tower seen here is a mid-nineteenth-century structure that still stands at the harbor entrance. The view is rendered in the soft pink-and-blue palette typical of early twentieth-century chromolithograph postcards.