- On this episode of "Field Trip," we are in the middle of the Hudson River.

- We're gonna get a behind-the-scenes look at the Hudson Athens Lighthouse, let's go.

(upbeat music) - We are in the middle of the Hudson River.

You are having the pleasure of joining me here, on the Hudson Athens Lighthouse.

(upbeat music continues) Well, inside it's a real house, which is, you know, kind of surprising, out here in the middle of the river.

But downstairs there's a kitchen and a living room and a dining room.

And the lighthouse keeper's bedroom, where he would sleep, you know, if he needed to be on duty.

But upstairs there are four bedrooms.

And so they could have their whole family here and it was like, you know, a house.

(laughs) - Have a party.

- But beyond that is the tower, so that's a really important part because that's where the real light is.

(upbeat music continues) - You have to remember that a lighthouse, first and foremost, is a light.

The house part of it is secondary.

The house part of it is just because you need somebody out here to keep the light going.

You need somebody out here to make sure that a ship doesn't run aground on the thing that the lighthouse was put there for.

So up and down the river you see different types of markers.

You'd see channel markers that are just little lanterns that would be hung out by somebody on shore.

And then you see buildings like this.

Aside from the actual beacon, the lighthouse is equipped with sound warnings.

Fog bells.

(bell rings) - Yes, hello.

(laughs) (group claps) - And so you have to imagine a family living out here.

Everybody's sleeping upstairs, in four bedrooms.

All the spaces down here are work spaces, kitchen, food prep, everything that has to go on the rest of the time, laundry, you name it.

If the fog rolls in in the middle of the night, we've got this clockwork fog bell mechanism that was installed at the beginning of the 20th century.

The idea being that the lighthouse keeper, rather than having to stay up at night and ring the bell manually with a hammer, could wind up a mechanism, just like a grandfather clock.

A big counterweight that runs down through the tower towards the basement.

You crank that up, draw the weight up, (mechanism creaks) (bell rings) and then the weight would pull back down on the chain and run a clockwork mechanism hooked up to an arm that would swing a hammer and hit a bell.

(mechanism ticks) (bell rings) So you'd wind that up, you wouldn't have to stay up with the bell at night.

But the bell's right outside your bedroom door, ringing, and keep you up as long as there's fog.

- There used to be nothing here where this lighthouse sits.

And it doesn't sit on any land at all.

There's no island or anything.

In fact, there's an island behind me that was all done from the dredgings of the river when the Corps of Engineers wanted to make the river bigger for shipping channels.

And the whole reason this is here is because there was a wreck there in 1832, the Swallow, of one of the big Hudson River steam paddle wheelers.

It was racing another boat from Albany, they called it time trials.

And it ran aground on the rocks on a stormy night.

17 people died and Congress said, well, we have to do something about this, that was 1832.

And the way they did it was they built it similarly to the way the docks and piers were built in New York City and other big cities.

They drove pilings into the water.

So this entire structure you see, sits on 200 wooden pilings that were driven into the water, right down to the mud line of the water.

And then a floor out of those, of regular floor beams, was in here.

The tides are very severe back and forth, they had to put some kind of a structure that would hold up to not just the water, but in the wintertime, especially then, the ice could be a foot thick and could pile up 20 feet high, which it has at the prow of this very lighthouse.

It's come right over the top of it.

- The lighthouse has been sitting out in the Hudson in all kinds of weather, wind and rain, all the normal things that the river does.

It's just that buildings like this, the way they were designed, they have a lifespan.

- Two things going on here, well, three really.

One is we have to stabilize what we have, that's the first problem.

The second problem is we're gonna have to contain it, and we'll do that with a steel curtain wall.

We'll build a wall, a metal wall all the way around it to our land limit, which is a 100-foot diameter circle in the middle of the Hudson River, that's all that we own.

- 100 years ago there were 14 lighthouses on the Hudson River.

Today, there are only seven.

The seven northern most have disappeared.

They were not in the middle of the river.

They were on a spit of land, but still, the ice floes eroded the land that they were on, and therefore they eventually disappeared.

- It's a lot of work, and it's taken a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of patience and a lot of explaining 'cause this is all below the water.

You don't see any of this stuff.

(gentle music) - Our goal is to save the lighthouse.

The important thing is that the community is already engaged with this space.

This is the sense of our identity, on both sides of the river.

People love the lighthouse.

They wanna come out here, but they love just looking at it.

It's like a little jewel box in the middle of the river.

They feel personal about it.

It's kind of romantic, so this is a special place.

- Thank you for joining us on this episode of "Field Trip."

- For more information, go to wmht.org/fieldtrip, and tell us, - [Both] Where you think should we should go next.

(upbeat music) (group laughs and chatters) - Enough of that.

- We're not the first ones to do that.

There's no way.