Downtown Rockland is home to the country's largest collection of lighthouse artifacts and memorabilia, housed in a building that also serves as the Maine Lighthouse Association's headquarters. The standout items are the original Fresnel lenses — large, intricate glass prisms that once focused lighthouse beams across miles of open water. The museum has more of these than anywhere else in the country.
Beyond the lenses, the museum covers the practical history of lighthouse keeping — the lives of the keepers and their families, the mechanics of the various light and fog signal systems, and the changing technology from whale oil to modern automated LEDs. A visit here gives context to the lighthouse landscape of coastal Maine, which has more lighthouses per mile of coastline than almost anywhere on earth.