Coffin Island Lighthouse

Near the end of July , 1811, Simeon Perkins, a 75-year-old town official and diarist from Liverpool, Nova Scotia, laid the first stone of the foundation of the Coffin Island Lighthouse. This was the fifth lighthouse built in Nova Scotia. Under the hands of carpenter James Leslie from Shelburne, a wooden tower rose fifty eight feet from the stone foundation. The Nova Scotia House of Assembly granted 500 pounds to build the tower and a dwelling for the keeper and a year later contributed another 500 pounds for equipment, lantern and railing. While provincially funded, the light was locally planned and supervised by a four man commission from Liverpool.

Liverpool in this period was the second most active port in Nova Scotia and enjoying a trade boom thanks to the Embargo Acts which channeled a large amount of US commerce through Nova Scotian ports. An impressive achievement for a growing community, the lighthouse was the only beacon between Sambro at Halifax, and Cape Roseway at Shelburne, which along with the light at Brier Island, made up all the lights in the province (aside from the ruins of the old French lighthouse at Louisbourg, Canada's first).

The lighthouse stood on the south end of the mile-long island, itself only a mile from the nearest mainland village at Beach Meadows. At the north end of the island, a small seasonal fishing harbour stood, and still stands, connected to the light by a road cut through the woods. Known as Bear Island in Perkin's time, it became known as Coffin Island by the 1817s after Peleg Coffin, one of the founding settlers in Liverpool and a large landowner on the island.