Ida Lewis

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Lime Rock Lighthouse, Newport, where Ida Lewis kept the light. Postcard, 1905. Sol-Art Prints / The Rotograph Co. Library of Congress.

She did the lighthouse keeper's job for twenty-two years before anyone gave her the title. Idawalley Zoradia Lewis was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on the twenty-fifth of February 1842. Her father Hosea was appointed keeper of Lime Rock Light and moved the family out onto the rock in 1857. Within a few months he had a stroke and never recovered. Ida was fifteen. She and her mother kept the light. She kept it, unofficially, until 1879. When her father died the appointment went to her mother. Ida was finally made keeper in her own name in 1879, and held the post until she died. The rescue that made her famous was on the twenty-ninth of March 1869. Two soldiers bound for Fort Adams capsized in a snowstorm. Ida had a cold. She went out without a coat or shoes and brought both men in. The Rhode Island General Assembly passed a resolution for her that May. On the Fourth of July, Newport gave her a mahogany rowboat with red velvet cushions and gold-plated oarlocks. Harper's Weekly ran her that year, and after that the visitors came out to the rock to see her — among them President Grant. On the fourth of February 1881 two soldiers went through the ice near the lighthouse and she pulled them both out. She was awarded the Gold Lifesaving Medal on the sixteenth of July that year, the first woman to receive it. How many lives she saved is genuinely unsettled. Eighteen is the official figure and the one most often quoted. The Treasury Secretary's own letter in 1881 cites thirteen in the department's papers and says there are many more that do not appear in the record. Other counts run to twenty-five and higher. Nobody has ever reconciled them. She had a stroke on the twenty-first of October 1911 while filling the lamp, and died three days later at sixty-nine. Every vessel in Newport Harbor tolled its bell that night. More than fourteen hundred people came to see her lie in the Thames Street Methodist Church. In 1924 Rhode Island renamed the rock and the light after her. It is the only lighthouse in the United States named for its keeper. If she is in your family, or an ancestor of yours was one of the people she pulled out of that water, add what you know below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.