Katherine Walker

Katherine "Kate" Walker (1850s – February 5, 1931) was born in Northern Germany as Katherine Gortler and was an American lighthouse keeper.

Walker tended the Robbins Reef Light in the Lower New York Bay in New York Harbor for more than thirty years after the death of her husband, Captain John Walker, who had been appointed keeper of the light in 1883. In 1886, John Walker was dying from pneumonia. In the hospital, his parting words to his wife were, "Mind the light, Kate." He never returned to the lighthouse again. Katherine Walker was appointed the official keeper of the light by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890, four years after her husband's death. During her commitment on the tower she rescued 50 sailors from shipwrecks, and raised two children, Jacob and Mary.

Katherine Walker immigrated to the United States in the 1870s. As a recently widowed mother, Walker settled in Sandy Hook, New Jersey where she got a job in a boarding house. There she met Captain John Walker, a retired sea captain who was the keeper of the Sandy Hook Light. He offered to give Kate English lessons, despite not speaking the language well himself. Soon the couple married, and Kate happily settled, with her son Jacob, into her new home in the Sandy Hook lighthouse. She quickly learned how to assist her husband with his duties, but soon after they were wed, Captain Walker was transferred to Robbins Reef Light.

Sandy Hook Light was land-based which allowed Kate to have a garden and plant vegetables. Such a garden would not be possible at Robbins Reef as the structure was surrounded by water, a fact that made Kate threaten to leave her husband. Later in life she told a visitor to the lighthouse of her first impression of her future home, “When I first came to Robbins Reef, the sight of the water, whichever way I looked, made me lonesome. I refused to unpack my trunks at first, but gradually, a little at a time, I unpacked. After a while they were all unpacked and I stayed on.” Kate ultimately stayed on for 33 years after her husband’s death from pneumonia in 1886. Captain Walker’s last words to his wife, “Mind the light, Kate,” motivated her to continue as the keeper at Robbins Reef. They were words Kate had often heard from her husband, and she intended to abide by them.

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