The Keepers’ Academy
In 1849 a school opened on a black rock beach to train lighthouse keepers. It called itself Lava Dunes, and its teams the Sandys.
The academy opened in 1849 under the name Lava Dunes, and it is worth pausing on how completely wrong that name was, because the wrongness is load-bearing for the next eighty years.
There are no dunes. There is no sand to make dunes out of. The beach is a shelf of black volcanic rock, which is a thing that produces cliffs, ledges, tide pools and hull damage, and which produces dunes under no circumstances whatsoever. Somebody in 1849 wanted a name that sounded like a place on a shore, reached for the two most shore-like words available, and did not check either of them against the window.
The name survived for seventy-eight years and it has never entirely gone away. The soccer, lacrosse and track complex on the south side of campus is called The Dunes to this day. Nobody who plays there has ever seen one.
And the teams were the Sandys
When athletics eventually arrived, the teams took the same wrong idea and made it worse. They were the Sandys, from 1849 to 1927, at a school on a beach with no sand, named for dunes that were not there, on a coast made of the one material in North America least like sand.
That nickname held for seventy-eight years and was never once questioned in public, which is the most nineteenth-century fact in this book. Four generations of students walked across black rock every day to play for a team called the Sandys, and not one of them appears to have said anything out loud.
What was actually taught
The curriculum, at the start, was the operating manual of a lighthouse. How to keep a flame that does not go out in weather that is trying to put it out. How to dress and true a mirror. How to stand a watch at the hour when a watch is least bearable and most necessary. How to keep a log that means something to the man who reads it after you.
Those are not romantic skills and the academy did not treat them romantically. Keepers were technicians. The school that trained them was a technical school, and the first thing it ever taught anybody was that the difference between a routine night and a family burying somebody is whether a person who was bored did the boring part properly.
From A Book of Rockbeach History.