Nancy Davidge was in her 20s when she moved into her current Marblehead home. Her next door neighbor was Barbara Mace, the daughter of Marblehead’s last lighthouse keeper, Edwin C. “Sparky” Rogers.
Starting in 1835, years before the Rogers rule, the lighthouse stood relatively short – 23 feet and pale white, with an octagonal lantern fueled by whale oil up top of the original tower. It originally produced a fixed white light fifty feet above high water. Now, the light beams green, and it is still fixed – the only one like that, actually, on the East Coast.
Time passed. Barbara grew up at the Marblehead Lighthouse throughout the 40s and 50s. In 2000, Nancy’s husband, Bill, moved in where she had lived for 41 years. Around that time, Mace grew sick and was housebound in Marblehead. So, on each of their trips on the coast, whether local or West, Bill and Nancy would send Barbara a postcard with a lighthouse. When she passed, the couple continued to send them to her husband, Allen “Al” Mace.
Now, the Marblehead lighthouse is integral to the burgee Bill and Nancy designed last year, standing as a strong brown stem above the harbor, guiding the coast with a fixed green light.
“A burgee is basically a nautical flag,” Nancy explained. “If you’re in the boating community, you know what it is. If you’re not, you wouldn’t have any reason to know.”
The funny thing, she added with a laugh, is that people sometimes walk up to them and ask if they’re selling burgers.
“Not exactly, no,” Nancy would respond with a laugh. “No burgers, just burgees.”
The burgee is a typically triangular flag that was used as an equivalent ID for mariners at sea. It is a pennant of a boating organization. Traditionally, flags were hoisted up on a ship for communication purposes when seamen began crossing oceans. Last year, Bill and Nancy decided to design an official burgee for the town of Marblehead.
They came across the idea on a trip to see their daughter in Oregon. Their son-in-law’s father owns The Beach Club Bar in Seaside and he hangs burgees from all over. In passing, he told Bill: “Hey, get one for Marblehead, and we’ll go and live back there!”
Bill took the idea seriously.
The couple adore the seaside town of Marblehead. For Bill, it is his adoptive home, having grown up in Mamaronech, New York, also big on the boating community. In her 20s, Nancy thought living on the ocean was the best of ideas. That’s how they wound up, together, in Marblehead.
A burgee for the town would have to have its most characteristic elements represented. And Nancy and Bill are the most well versed in the specificities of the town’s symbols and boating traditions I have ever met.
“The first thing you think of is the lighthouse. And then I looked on the other side, right up Clark Landing, that has latitude and longitude,” Bill said. He thought, “Hey, those would be two great things just to sew up on a burgee!”
The particularity of the Marblehead lighthouse is its fixed green light, the only one on the East Coast. “It had to be unique enough so it can be differentiated, and so sailors would not confuse it with something else,” Bill explained.
“Each lighthouse has its own assigned pattern of light, so that if you’re at sea and you see a light flashing red every five seconds, you can look at a chart and know: that’s the lighthouse in X,” Nancy added.
The lighthouse’s sequencing and characteristics are particular to the place it sits on. The design choices for the burgee were made based on what Bill and Nancy were trying to represent. They called upon a Florida-based company, Nauti Flags, a Service-Disabled Certified and Veteran-Owned company dedicated to customizing high-quality boat flags.
“This is high quality. As a matter of fact, the boaters look at it and say, ‘This is good stuff,’” Bill said, pulling out the burgee to show me its details. “It’s a marine canvas, brass rivets and double-sided, four-way cross stitch on the fly end.”
Boaters’ stamp of approval: obtained.
There are many reasons to buy the Marblehead burgee. Boaters put it up on their boat, while town fans who moved away receive it as remembrance. It can be used for your kid’s dorm room in college, for burgee collectors or for a local porch. Some local bars display the burgee inside, and one man told Bill and Nancy he’s got burgees lining the walls of his garage. A couple, now living in Washington state, bought a sticker of it for the back of their car.
“You can hang it on your porch. You can hang it on your shed. You can hang it in your family room,” Nancy said. “People find we have one on a flagpole outside our house!” It is a way to identify other Marbleheaders and people who have an affection for the town.
“We’re still very small, but I think the potential is really big for something that is fun, different, and represents Marblehead,” she added. “It really is a town item.”
“We think that this really could become the burgee for Marblehead. It’s a big ambition, but it could,” Nancy said.
