Hard Telling Not Knowing tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
Folk heroes can be real, like Johnny Appleseed, or almost certainly fictional, like John Henry, the steel-driving man. Mainers have their own folk heroes, from the real outdoorsman Jigger Johnson to fictional giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan and Miss Rumphius, the lupine lady, based in part on a real person but otherwise fictional.
It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not, especially when there are books, movies and plays based on these characters, such as Abbie Burgess, the teenage girl who in the 1850s tended a lonely Maine lighthouse by herself while a deadly storm raged outside.
However, Burgess is 100 percent real, and her heroics actually happened. She’s been the subject of a beloved children’s book, had a U.S. Coast Guard cutter named after her and is now the subject of the play “Matinicus: A Lighthouse Play,” set to premiere Friday at the Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor.
Burgess, born in 1839, was one of nine children of Samuel and Thankful Burgess. In 1853, her father was named lighthouse keeper of Matinicus Rock, a tiny granite island 25 miles off Rockland and several miles away from the main island of Matinicus.
Not long after settling into their new home, Samuel Burgess decided to take off and lobster fish in order to make money, leaving his family to care for the lighthouse. At age 14, Abbie Burgess found herself the de facto lighthouse keeper when her father was off fishing.
By January 1856, the family had been at the Rock for nearly three years. It was a particularly rough winter, and a supply ship meant to bring the family food for the season and oil to keep the lamps burning did not show up. Samuel Burgess left for the mainland to attempt to restock, leaving his daughter in charge.
Not long after he left, a gale rolled into Penobscot Bay, flooding the Rock and blasting it with wind. The winds were so strong that it damaged the newly constructed family home and forced the Burgesses to retreat to the lighthouse itself, and conditions were so bad for weeks afterwards that Samuel Burgess was stuck on the mainland for nearly a month. The family stayed huddled in the lighthouse, subsisting on a cup of cornmeal mush and one egg per person per day, until their father was able to return home with supplies.
Through it all, 16-year-old Abbie Burgess not only made sure her family was safe, but also carefully rationed the remaining oil that kept the lights burning, ensuring the safety of mariners. It’s believed Burgess was the country’s first female lighthouse keeper — and at the time, possibly its youngest ever.
Samuel Burgess left Matinicus Rock in 1861, but Abbie Burgess stayed on to train further with the new keeper. She eventually married the new keeper’s son, Isaac, and the couple stayed on Matinicus Rock for 14 years. They later moved to Whitehead Light, off the coast of St. George, where they stayed for another 15 years before retiring in 1890. Abbie Burgess died two years later, in 1892 at age 53.
The story of Burgess was largely an oral history passed down through generations, via storytelling around coastal dinner tables and in local historical societies in Maine. In 1946, 90 years after her heroic actions, a maritime historian located Burgess’ grave in Thomaston and had a lighthouse statue placed upon it.
Decades later, in 1985, authors Connie and Peter Roop and illustrator Peter Hanson published “Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie,” a children’s book telling Burgess’ story. In 1987, the book was featured on the popular PBS children’s literacy program “Reading Rainbow,” hosted by LeVar Burton. Suddenly, a once obscure Maine story was thrust into the national spotlight.
The legend of Burgess grew as the book became a regular part of classrooms, libraries and bedtime reading across the country. In 1998, the U.S. Coast Guard commissioned the cutter Abbie Burgess, which has been stationed in Rockland ever since, patrolling Maine waters from Boothbay to the Canadian border.
In 2022, the Chance Theater in Anaheim, California, commissioned playwright and Maine native Jenny Connell Davis to write a play based on Burgess’ story. “Matinicus: A Lighthouse Play” is a one-person show set on that lonely Maine lighthouse in 1856, exploring not just Burgess’ actions during the storm, but the life she lived before and after it.
Penobscot Theatre’s production of “Matinicus,” directed by local theater artist Julie Arnold Lisnet, is just the second-ever production of Davis’ play, and stars California performer Katie Peabody as Burgess. It opens Friday at the Bangor Opera House, and runs for three weeks. Tickets are available at the opera house box office, or online.
Burgess’ story still resonates: a tough, resilient Maine woman, who did what she had to do to take care of her family and community, set against the backdrop of the Gulf of Maine, in all its beauty and danger. She became a folk hero to Mainers because she did the right thing and stayed the course — a feat that later became legendary in its own right.
