Portland Head Light has stood watch over the approach to Portland Harbor since 1791, commissioned by George Washington himself and completed under the supervision of two masons from Cape Elizabeth who quarried rubble stone from the surrounding cliffs. The tower rose seventy-two feet in its original configuration, then gained twenty feet in an 1865 extension that brought the focal plane to one hundred feet above mean high water. Its fourth-order Fresnel lens, installed in 1855 and replaced by a modern beacon in 1989, now resides in the museum housed within the former keeper's quarters at Fort Williams Park. The station occupies a granite headland where Casco Bay meets the open Atlantic, a position that made it the first light mariners saw when approaching one of New England's busiest nineteenth-century ports. More than three hundred vessels cleared Portland's wharves each month during the peak of the lime trade, and the white conical tower served as the sole navigational aid between Cape Ann and Pemaquid Point. Today the Coast Guard maintains the light as an active aid to navigation while the Town of Cape Elizabeth operates the surrounding ninety-acre park and the museum, which opened in 1992 and displays ship models, lens fragments, and logbooks spanning two centuries of maritime traffic. Portland maine trolley tour tickets provide direct access to the station and its museum during operating hours, with most routes departing from the Old Port district and following Shore Road through the residential stretches of Cape Elizabeth. The ride covers four miles and passes two additional light stations—Spring Point Ledge, connected to the mainland by a granite breakwater completed in 1951, and Ram Island Ledge, a caisson tower standing three-quarters of a mile offshore. Trolley tours include stop time at Fort Williams, where visitors can walk the keeper's house perimeter, photograph the tower from the rocky foreshore, and explore the museum's collection of navigational artifacts. The park itself preserves the remains of a coastal defense installation active from 1872 through 1963, including earthwork batteries and the ruined arches of the Goddard Mansion, burned in 1962. The museum operates year-round with reduced winter hours, and the grounds remain open from dawn to dusk regardless of season. Fog can obscure the tower for days during June and July, when warm air moves over cold inshore water, but the same conditions produce the deep resonance of the station's fog signal, automated in 1975 and audible three miles offshore. Most Portland maine trolley tour tickets tours schedule forty-five minutes at the site, enough time to tour the museum, walk the headland trail, and photograph the tower from the eastern beach.