Lighthouse keeping was one of the few non-clerical federal jobs open to women in the 19th century. The Lighthouse Service, established in 1789 as part of Congress’s first Public Works Act, was originally overseen by the Treasury Department; it merged into the Coast Guard in 1939. No official policies prevented women from being lighthouse keepers, although most, like Zoradia Lewis, were appointed after the death or incapacity of their husbands. Between 1828 and 1905, at least 122 women held the official government position of lighthouse keeper. Because their duties — lighting the lamp, patiently watching the coastline, maintaining the lighthouse itself — appeared non-martial and even “domestic,” women could serve as lighthouse keepers without seeming to disrupt traditional notions of femininity. Yet Ida Lewis’s life reveals a more complex story.
Well before her official 1879 appointment as keeper of Lime Rock, Lewis had earned renown for her daring feats. A highly skilled rower and swimmer, Lewis reportedly performed her first rescue as a teenager, in the fall of 1858, when she rowed out to save four young men after their sailboat capsized in Newport Harbor. Her most famous rescue, on the stormy night of March 29, 1869, saved the lives of two Army soldiers whose boat had capsized as they sailed back to Fort Adams following an evening in Newport. When her mother spotted the soldiers clinging to their overturned boat, Ida went down to the shore, rowed through icy water and pulled the two men into her own boat. (A boy the soldiers had hired as a guide had already drowned.) For this courageous feat, Lewis received several medals, and President Ulysses S. Grant visited Lime Rock to meet Newport's heroine.
Covered in newspapers throughout the nation, Ida Lewis’s March 1869 rescue made her an overnight celebrity. New technologies of mass communication enabled the thrilling story — and, importantly, Lewis’s image — to be circulated across the nation. That spring and summer, she appeared in hundreds of local newspapers, which could receive faraway news via telegraph; on the covers of national magazines such as Harper’s Weekly; in photographs reprinted on mass-produced postcards and calling cards; and even in songs, like “The Ida Lewis Mazurka” and the "Rescue Polka Mazurka," that were popularized through illustrated sheet music. The town of Newport designated July 4, 1869, as “Ida Lewis Day” and sponsored a parade in its heroine’s honor, at which spectators could purchase Ida Lewis-themed hats, ties and other collectibles.