OVERVIEW

These data show the location of all 58 extant lighthouses on the coastline of Massachusetts.  While many of the lighthouses represented are active aids to navigation maintained by the United States Coast Guard, others are not and are maintained privately.  All lighthouses are shown in their current positions and may have been moved from their original location. The layer was produced by the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM). MassGIS stores this layer in ArcSDE (Oracle) as LIGHTHOUSES_PT.

Lighthouse names and general locations were compiled from the following two websites: National Park Service, Marine Heritage Program and the Coast Guard, Historic Light Station Information & Photography: MASSACHUSETTS. Since most lighthouses serve as survey control stations maintained by National Geodetic Survey (see http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/datasheet.prl), individual lighthouses were geographically located by plotting their coordinates in a GIS. For those lighthouses that do not serve as survey control stations, their geographic location was determined by "on screen digitization" of the most large-scale NOAA chart for the region. These latter points were then overlayed on the 2001 Massachusetts color ortho imagery. When the digitized point and the the location of the lighthouse on the ortho photo differed, the point was moved to match the ortho photo. All points were given a final check by comparing their locations to the ortho photos.

The layer's point attribute table contains the following items:

LOCATION		A brief verbal description of the lighthouse's location; e.g. "Cape Cod / Nauset Beach."
NAME		The lighthouse's name as given by the National Park Service
CONTROL		Indicates whether or not ("yes"/"no") the location data were derived from National Geodetic Survey data
USE		The lighthouse's current use

CZM will provide any updates to MassGIS.

Last Updated 7/14/2006
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