Who was Katherine Walker?
My curiosity was piqued when I read that crew members of USCGC KATHERINE WALKER brought flowers to a gravesite on Staten Island, N.Y. before beginning a patrol. I learned the gravesite belonged to Kate Walker, the diminutive keeper of the Robbins Reef Light from 1895 to 1919. Born Katherine Gortler in Germany in the 1840s, she was widowed early and emigrated to America with her 7-year-old son to find a better life. She got a job in Sandy Hook, NJ where she met retired sea captain and civil war veteran John Walker, then the assistant keeper of Sandy Hook Light. What began with him giving her English lessons ended in their marriage, shortly after which Capt. Walker became keeper of Robbins Reef Lighthouse, then one of the most modern lighthouses on the East Coast.
At Robbins Reef, the petite (4’ 10” [1.2m] 100 lbs. [45kg]) Kate was assistant lightkeeper, homemaker, wife and mother. Robbins Reef Light was a mile out in the harbor, accessible only by boat. It had no dock: to enter the lighthouse one climbed up a steep ladder from a rowboat, then lifted the boat up on davits for safe keeping. When her husband died of pneumonia a couple of years later, Kate immediately began performing her husband’s duties while applying to the Lighthouse Commission for appointment as official lightkeeper at Robbins Reef. Officials balked. She continued to petition until, some four years after her husband’s passing (during which time she alone managed the Robbins Reef Light), she was appointed official lightkeeper.
It was a hard life. Each night she set out the eight kerosene lamps backed by reflectors that were rotated by a slowly descending weight clock-like mechanism to project light onto a large lens one could see 12 miles away on a clear night. Every few hours throughout the night those lamps needed refilling and the clockwork weight had to be wound up so the lens would keep rotating. In winter she had to go out on a narrow catwalk, scraping ice or snow from each window. If fog rolled into the harbor, she had to start an engine in the cellar that sounded a foghorn at 3 second intervals. Should the engine fail she’d climb to the top of the tower and hammer on a bell to signal to the Lighthouse Depot on the mainland that repairs were necessary at the Lighthouse. Come daybreak she’d sleep until it was time to row her children, Jacob and little Mary, to school, a mile away on Staten Island and row back to pick them up at day’s end. During the day the lamp wicks had to be trimmed, reflectors and Fresnel lens had to be cleaned and polished, and a record of the weather and ship traffic maintained. During WWI she would unfurl an American flag as a farewell or welcome salute to departing and arriving troop transports. From time to time she also rowed out to assist distressed vessels and is credited with having saved fifty lives, mostly fishermen whose boats went aground on the reef in storms.
Pursuant to a new regulation, the government ordered Kate to retire in 1919. At the tender age of 71 she moved to nearby Staten Island and lived within sight of the beacon. For years pilots and tug captains continued to refer to the lighthouse as “Kate’s Light”. When Kate Walker died at age 83 on 05 February 1931 the New York Evening Post wrote this obituary: “A great city’s waterfront is rich in romance. There are queenly liners, the grim battle craft, the countless carriers of commerce that pass in endless procession. And amid all this and in the sight of the city of towers and the torch of liberty lived this sturdy little woman, proud of her work and content in it, keeping her lamp alight and her windows clean, so that New York Harbor might be safe for ships that pass in the night.”
Picture 3, Robbins Reef Light circa 1917, USCG photo
Picture 1, Robbins Reef Light 2011 by J. Stephen Conn
Picture 2, Kate Walker page in New York Tribune 23 Feb 1919
Picture 4, Kate Walker circa 1909, photographer unknown
