Cleveland East Ledge Light
lighthouse in Massachusetts, United States
Cleveland East Ledge Light is a historic lighthouse in Falmouth, Massachusetts. It sits on a man-made island in shallow water on the eastern of the two halves of Cleveland Ledge, which is said to have been named for President Grover Cleveland because he owned the nearby Gray Gables estate and used to fish in the area. It marks the east side of the beginning of the dredged channel leading to the Cape Cod Canal and is the first fixed mark when going northbound through the canal. As it is an important mark in an area subject to fog, it has a racon showing the letter "C".
Structure
The lighthouse is built atop a caisson 52 feet in diameter, which also contains the lighthouse's engine room. The first two floors of the lighthouse serve as living and working space, on top of which sits the cylindrical concrete tower which is another 50 feet tall.
History
The lighthouse was built between 1940 and 1943 after a re-dredging of the Cape Cod Canal in the late 1930s, which allowed larger ships to pass through and necessitated the marking of Cleveland East Ledge, which sits quite close to the path of ships approaching the south entrance to the canal. The state of Massachusetts began the project, but in 1941 turned it over to the Coast Guard, which, after delays caused by the war, completed it in 1943.
In 1978, the laying of an underwater cable to the lighthouse allowed its automation, obviating the need for the 4-person Coast Guard crew which had staffed the light since its 1943 inauguration. The lighthouse was sealed and would remain unoccupied for much of the next 3 decades, apart from a 3-week renovation by the Coast Guard in 1990.
The public source identifies “Cleveland East Ledge Light” as lighthouse in Massachusetts, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cleveland, East and Ledge.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5132124. Authority coordinates are 41.631, -70.694. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1943, 1941 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cleveland East Ledge Light” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.