Today in #thelightseries let’s turn around from the bell mechanism and cast our eyes up the final ascent to the top of the lighthouse.

Most of the lighthouse building is structured like a normal, if narrow, house. A foyer from the entrance leads into two small rooms to the left, or a hallway with a door on the right leads to the basement (closed to visitors) and a narrow L shaped wooden staircase gently swirls its way to the second floor. The second floor also features some small bedrooms (3 or 4) and another much more circular staircase leading to a side platform where the bell and its mechanisms lie, which turns into the final circular metal staircase seen in this #photo that leads to the top of the lighthouse tower where the light would typically be installed.

This staircase is narrow with no handholds and we should take our time ascending it, so tomorrow the next installment in the series will feature what’s at the top, which you will be able to see if you check back at #drybeer for my daily photo series. Fair series coming in just a few minutes.

Today in #thelightseries we finish talking about the bell system fitted to the lighthouse. Yesterday was a glimpse of the long decommissioned bell that lay in the corner of the lighthouse platform as a demonstration of just how much effort it takes to draw sound out of the bell. Today we instead have a #photo of the bell that is installed in the lighthouse outside the sunwashed windows and the one of a kind mechanical system of weights and chains that was set up to strike it with precise regularity.

This was important, because each lighthouse along the hudson river actually sounded at different regular intervals so that a navigator could roughly distinguish their position in the water when visibility was low. The Hudson-Athens lighthouse was designed to strike its bell once every 15 seconds, different from the lighthouses that surrounded it. The system of mechanical weights and chains that drives the mechanism to strike the bells is unique to the lighthouse and any replacement to broken parts in the system would have to be custom made by a specialist if the system ever broke down. It is still quite capable of striking the bell, as one of the members of the preservation society personally demonstrated to me with a single ring of the bell. This system, much like many in the lighthouse, were engineered to truly last.

For another detail about the story of the lighthouse, come back each day to #drybeer where the series continues bit by bit.

Onward to today’s subject in #thelightseries! Today let’s take a look at one of the older bells once fitted to the lighthouse, which now resides in a corner of the lighthouse platform outdoors and has a mallet next to it so you can see just how much that sucker requires to really cast sound into the distance. This bell is stamped by the US Coast Guard from around the time that the Coast Guard first took authority over the lighthouses from the civilian authorities which watched over it for so long before then.

In future #photos in the series I’ll show the bell that’s now installed on the lighthouse and the unique mechanical system designed to strike it at regular intervals, so if you find this interesting, check back each day at #drybeer where I’m telling the story of this lighthouse and its relationship with the river a bit at a time.