Len first heard about the Mare Island light and its keeper from his grandmother, Elizabeth Coffee, who was Kate McDougal’s niece. Born in San Francisco in 1883, Elizabeth often visited the lighthouse as a child during summer and holiday breaks, when she would hop aboard the Navy tug that brought supplies from San Francisco. Sometimes she stayed with her aunt and cousins for weeks at a time, and sometimes for the whole summer.

Life at the lighthouse must have been quite an adventure for young Elizabeth, who explored the island with her cousins and helped to tend the beacon and the gardens. For the rest of her life she loved to tell stories about the times she spent there. “She said the old lighthouse building was full of nooks and crannies where you could hide--curl up in a corner with the sun shining on your back and a good book to read,” Len says. Not everything was so cozy, though: Elizabeth also remembered that the island had an impressive number of rattlesnakes--so many that the gardener kept a hoe handy to chop off their heads.

The next stop on our tour this morning is a spot along a dirt road above where we think the lighthouse was, partway up the hill that comprises much of the southern end of Mare Island. We get out of our cars and peer downhill, locating the grove of eucalyptus that Myrna and I had scrambled up to. There’s nothing else to be seen, lighthouse-wise, but in any case our eyes are drawn to the water--Carquinez Strait, sparkling in the morning sun. A ferry glides silently toward Vallejo; the waves in its wake slap the shore below us. To our left the Carquinez Bridge spans the strait between Benicia and Crockett.

Having escorted us safely off Navy land, Bob peels off from the group, and we continue to the summit. A sculpture called the Spirit Ship, erected here in 1996 in tribute to the island’s naval shipyard workers, stands in stark outline against the green turf and blue water. Through the slight haze, we can see for miles in all directions--Mt. Tamalpais to the west, looming above San Pablo Bay; to the east, Carquinez Bridge and beyond it Suisun Bay; Mt. Diablo to the south. Below the bluffs on the southwestern shore of the island, grass growing on former dredge ponds glows a brilliant green. It’s easy to see why this area was chosen to become a park--it’s lovely, and peaceful.

In the 1880s this was a remote and isolated place, and Kate and her family must have been lonely sometimes, though they had a horse and buggy for visiting. Their friends at the Navy Yard looked out for them: at Christmastime in 1881 some officers put up poles and ran a telephone line out to the lighthouse. The family had regular help, too: a Chinese-American cook provided most of the meals, and an Irishman named Bonny helped with the heavy maintenance and took care of the horses and two cows, Chummy and Buttercup. Daughter Caroline had a mastiff dog named Makado for company.

For the most part, Kate educated the children herself, including preparing her son to enter the Naval Academy. (Later he joined the Marines, eventually rising to the rank of brigadier general.) Kate’s daughters were older than Elizabeth, who remembered spying on one of them “sparking” with her fiance in the lighthouse. All three girls were married in the lighthouse, and all three married military men. The eldest, also named Kate, returned to the lighthouse with her own daughter in 1898 when her husband left to serve in the Spanish-American War, and stayed until 1916, with her husband joining them between his many assignments. After the elder Kate retired, she went to live with Caroline, who was by then married to the medical officer at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, until her death in 1932, at the age of 90.