Jamestown was incorporated in 1678 with about 150 residents, and in the early 1700s its town council established a watch house, a fire beacon, and oversight at Beaver Tail. In 1749, Peter Harrison, known as America's First Architect, designed and built the first light tower there, the third lighthouse built in Colonial America, a wooden structure 58 feet high to the cornice with an 11-foot lantern on top. After the tower burned in 1753 from an unknown cause, a second tower was built of stone and rubble left over from Fort George in Newport. During the Revolution, after Rhode Island became the first American colony to declare independence from Britain in 1776, British troops departing Newport in 1779 burned the inside tower wood and removed some of the lighting equipment. In 1789, George Washington selected Beavertail Light and 11 other lighthouses for transfer to the national government, and in 1793 the deed to Beavertail was transferred to the United States government. The station later saw repeated innovation, including an 1817 experiment using manufactured gas conducted by Newport inventor David Melville, installation of an air fog trumpet powered by a horse-driven compressor pump in 1851, construction of the present granite light tower in 1856 with a third-order Fresnel lens and keeper's residence, and installation in 1857 of the first Ericssion coloric coal-fed engine for the fog signal, followed by other foghorn equipment tests over the next 40 years. In 1931, the first electric light-beacon was installed at Beavertail, and after the Great Hurricane of 1938 destroyed the fog signal building and exposed the original 1749 lighthouse foundation, a new fog signal building was erected beside the granite tower. Responsibility for navigational aids passed to the United States Coast Guard in 1939, the beacon and fog signal were automated in 1972, the station was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, and museum restoration and management efforts followed from 1983 through 2010, including replacement of the Fresnel lens in 1991, radar confirmation in 2007 that the 1749 tower was octagonal, major restoration of the granite tower in 2009, and restoration of the 1905 oil storage building in 2010.
