According to NELights, a series of epic shipwrecks led to the 1791 construction of the Portland Head Lighthouse, Maine’s oldest, “atop a rocky cliff on the shoreline” in Casco Bay. Capt. Joshua Freeman Strout, who was named for then-lighthouse keeper Capt. Joshua Freeman, for whom his mother worked in the 1820s, made a name for himself as Captain of the brig Scotland. After a severe fall aboard his ship Andres, Captain Strout took over the Portland Head Lighthouse in the 1860s, where the duties passed down from father to son. These Strouts were involved in rescues on wrecks near the lighthouse including the Annie C. Maguire and the Bohemian,

Capt. Strout was allegedly a friend of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and may have been the inspiration behind Longfellow’s “The Lighthouse.” A family parrot named Billy was said to have warned Captain Strouts about inclement weather for years.

Four generations of Strouts kept the Portland Head Lighthouse for a combined 128 years.