Located in Portland, Maine on Great Diamond Island
Echo Point Lighthouse, also called Pocahontas Light, on Maine’s Casco Bay is famous for being the smallest Coast-Guard-registered lighthouse in the US. There’s just one problem…
Echo Point Light sits on private property located on the southeast corner of Great Diamond Island off the coast of Portland, Maine. It is not accessible to the public but viewing it from the water is incredibly easy. The Casco Bay Lines ferries cruise by it multiple times a day during their mail runs, passenger services, and specialty cruises up Diamond Pass.
These specialty cruises are one of my favorite things about living in Portland. I try to take one every Summer and Autumn. I have the ferry captains’ description of this lighthouse committed to memory:
“Pocahontas Light is just 6′ tall and is the smallest lighthouse in the country registered by the US Coast Guard.”
Naturally this noteworthy beacon I am so familiar with made the top of my list when I decied to start my project of visiting and painting all of Maine’s iconic lighthouses.
Readers familiar with this blog will know that I rely heavily on the website lighthousefriends.com to provide historical background to my paintings. Their exacting research often provides me with fun facts and interesting stories that deepen my appreciation of each lighthouse I visit. Naturally, I was surprised when I couldn’t find any mention of Pocahontas Lighthouse on their site. Nor was there any listing for Echo Point Light or any lighthouse on Diamond Pass at all.1
This omission made me curious. Surely the smallest USCG-registered lighthouse in the country should be on any list of Maine’s lighthouses? I searched other lists: It was not on Wikipedia2. Nor was it on the United States Lighthouse Society’s website3. It was not included in lists compiled by Down East Magazine4, The Portland Press Herald5, or Maine Lights Today. The latter also listed nearby Portland Breakwater Lighthouse (Bug Light) as being the shortest lighthouse in Maine at 19 and a half feet6.
The only places I consistently found mentions of Pocahontas Light being the smallest official lighthouse in the country were on social media posts and travel websites. These abundant, top-ranked search results simply echoed each other echoing the information the Casco Bay Lines captains included in their tours. This was when I decided I was going to have to research a lighthouse myself for a change.
Local Folklore
My initial research yielded a few stories shared on social media that were not backed up by any documentation, articles, or interviews that I could find.
One of these stories was that the owner of the property built the lighthouse so he could find his dock at night after visiting the bars on Peak’s Island and the Coast Guard made him register it as a private aid to navigation.
Another story was that it was accidentally labeled as a lighthouse on a nautical chart one year so they just kept it that way.
I could also find no documentation about who built, when it was built, or when it started to be called “Pocahontas Light.”
In a 2022 article in Portland Monthly Magazine, the then-owner of the property, Meredith Reed, stated,
“Some of the ferries and tour boats can be creative when trying to make their spiels entertaining. For years, I’d hear the Casco Bay Lines narrator talk about [Echo Point] being the spot where Captain John Smith lit his signal fires (highly questionable, I think), which may be why they started calling it Pocahontas Light.7“
I asked Larry Legere, a retired Casco Bay Lines ferry captain and the official “unofficial historian of Casco Bay Lines,8” about this. He confirmed Reed’s story saying,
“Meredith is correct in that the name Pocahontas was coined by someone telling stories on the Bay Lines cruise. Not sure who or when but I know it was not me.”
Captain Legere was also kind enough to ask another “long time CBL captain and Great Diamond Island resident” who also believed “it was coined in the 70’s or 80’s by Bay Lines captains trying to embellish the narration.”
Trying to find out who built it and when also proved to be elusive. My initial search results returned an A.I. answer of 1938, but when I went through all the links in the list of sources, none of them mentioned the date 1938. Some of the sources weren’t even about this lighthouse. Just for fun I asked it why it said the date was 1938 when there was no documentation supporting its answer. This was it’s response:
“Google’s AI likely “hallucinated” the 1938 date for the Pocahontas Light because generative AI predicts text based on statistical patterns rather than verifying facts. When official documentation is missing for obscure local trivia, the AI often blends dates from nearby maritime history or invents a plausible-sounding year.”
Dealing with AI made me appreciate LighthouseFriends.org’s research even more.
In the same Portland Monthly article, Meredith Reed states, “It’s been here probably for close to a hundred years.7”
The Portland Tax Assessors office historical records indicate a 1.5 story Cape-style cabin was built on the site in 1888. There is a second record for a 1.5 story “cottage” being built in 1900, but it is unclear if the cottage replaced the original home or was built nearby on the same parcel. The list of outbuildings mentions a “heavy dock” and two utility sheds, but no lighthouse. It is interesting however that it lists the heat and power systems for the 1900 cottage as electric9, so a functioning electric lighthouse could have been built after that, which backs up Reed’s statement. The assessment history only goes back to 1950 when the property was owned as a seasonal residence by Donald Doughty of Cape Elizabeth.
Realizing I was probably not going to find out the exact year Echo Point Lighthouse was built, I decided to tackle the real burning question: Is it in fact the smallest USCG-registered lighthouse in the country, or even a registered lighthouse at all?
Let’s Get Nautical
My first step was to look for it in the latest edition of the official Northeast Light List (Volume 1) put out by the US Coast Guard which contains “a list of lights, sound signals, buoys, daybeacons, and other aids to navigation.10” This list includes “Private Aids.” If the local legend of the Coast Guard making the owner register it as a private aid to navigation was true it should be included. It was not.
Undaunted and remembering the story that it was “accidentally listed as a lighthouse one year” I went through all the archived Light Lists I could find, all the way back to 1888.11 There was no mention of a Pocahontas Light, an Echo Point Light, or any private aids to navigation on Great Diamond Island or in Diamond Pass.
Following my fruitless search through 137 years of Light Lists, I started going through all of the archived nautical charts I could find. Specifically NOAA charts 325 and 315 for Casco Bay and Portland Harbor.12 In 1942 a circle with a black dot in the middle appears on Echo Point for the first time. This symbol indicates a “position of point of interest” used to mark “conspicuous landmarks”. It is labeled with the abbreviation, “HO.(F.S.)” which indicates a “house” and “flag pole”. The “FS” disappeared from the charts in 1943. None of the charts available from 1944 onward indicate the point of interest as ever being mislabled as a lighthouse.
I feel it necessary to note that just because something is marked as a landmark on nautical charts that does not make it a registered lighthouse. If that symbol alone made it a registered lighthouse, then you’d have to be willing to define the stand pipe on Peaks Island, the smoke stack of the Wyman Power Station on Cousins Island, and numerous flag poles scattered up and down the coast as registered lighthouses as well. That symbol requires no registration. It simply indicates that the surveyers who help create and maintain the charts noted them as conspicuous landmarks that could serve as helpful navigational aids.
Finally I went right to the source and contacted the US Coast Guard’s Northern New England Sector. They got back to me and said they consider it a “tower” and is not a registered lighthouse.
As much as I respect the captains and crew of the Casco Bay Lines, and as much as I love the whimsy it brings to our local islands, I can confidently say that Echo Point Light is not, nor ever has been, a USCG-registered lighthouse.
So the next question is, does it even matter?
I personally think Captain Legere also provided an answer to that question when I asked him what he knew about the origins of Echo Point Light…
“I do believe it was built for ornamental purposes and not an official light, it was marked on charts and sure came in handy when lit.”
If a seasoned ferry captain who’s been up and down Diamond Pass countless times still refers to Echo Point Light as “handy when lit” then that’s good enough for me. It may not be official to the US Coast Guard, but it is a beloved and meaningful lighthouse to the mariners of Casco Bay.
About the Painting
My painting, “Echo Point Light with Seagull,” is 14″x18″ gouache on panel-mounted paper. My last few paintings of much larger lighthouses have been only 16″x12.” I’ve been thinking of making future paintings even smaller just because it’s turning into a much longer project that I thought. However, I wanted to add a couple touches of whimsy to this one which influenced its size. Firstly I wanted to add a seagull perched atop the lighthouse to give the viewer something to compare the size of the lighthouse to.
Secondly, purely for my own amusement, I wanted to make the lighthouse 1/12th scale. This meant it needed to be 6″ high. Making the total artwork 18″ tall was the only way I was going to be able to include the seagull, the to-scale lighthouse, and the rocky shoreline of Echo Point.
The lighthouse used to be all white, but was recently repainted to match the yellow, white, and red of the Casco Bay Lines ferries, which I find fitting given how the history of this little light is so intertwined with the ferry captains that helped make it famous.
The original painting and prints of the artwork are available through my online gallery at FineArtNewEngland.com.
Sources
My intent with this blog is to share paintings and stories that come from visiting each of Maine’s lighthouses. I never intended to be a historian or researcher. Echo Point made me step out of my comfort zone and I found I thoroughly enjoyed researching this lighthouse. I would have loved to explore area libraires, historical societies, and museums if time allowed and I may still do that. If anyone has documentation or artifacts that shed light on any of the unanswered questions about Echo Point Light, I would love to see them and would be happy to amend this post.
I want to especially thank Captain Larry Legere for his patience with me and sharing his memories from working on the Casco Bay Lines ferries.
Below is a list of the sources I was able to find on my laptop from the comfort of my couch
1: https://www.lighthousefriends.com/pull-state.asp?state=ME
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lighthouses_in_Maine
3: https://uslhs.org/
4: https://downeast.com/travel-outdoors/lighthouses/
5: https://www.pressherald.com/2025/09/07/a-guide-to-maines-66-lighthouses/
6: https://www.mainelightstoday.com/maine-lighthouse-facts/
7: Portland Monthly Magazine, May, 2022. “Harbor Lights” by Colin W. Sargent.
8: https://www.cascobaylines.com/about-us/history/
9: https://assessors.portlandmaine.gov/
10: https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/light-list-annual-publication
11: https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/archives, https://uslhs.org/gr/light_lists/light_lists.php
12: https://historicalcharts.noaa.gov/
13: https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/publications/docs/us-chart-1/ChartNo1.pdf