In 1854 Hosea Lewis became keeper of a lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island, and in 1857 moved his family onto Lime Rock, a sliver of stone in the harbor. Within four months he suffered a paralyzing stroke, and his 15 year old daughter Ida took over the work: hauling fuel, filling the lamps at sundown and midnight, trimming wicks, and polishing soot from the reflectors. She also rowed her siblings to school and fetched groceries and medicine, becoming the best swimmer in Newport. She made her first rescue at 12, and on March 29, 1869, sick and without a coat or boots, she and her younger brother rowed into a snowstorm to pull two soldiers from the water after their boat to Fort Adams overturned and their 14 year old guide drowned.

A New York Tribune feature, then Harper’s Weekly and Leslie’s, made her a national sensation in a country hungry for heroes after the Civil War. Admirers gave her a mahogany rowboat with red velvet cushions and gold plated oarlocks, up to 100 visitors came in a day and 9,000 in one summer, and guests included Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When her father died in 1873 the government appointed her mother keeper. Only in 1879, with help from Senator Ambrose Burnside, was Ida officially named keeper, at $750 a year, the highest keeper pay in the nation. In 1881 she became the first woman awarded the gold lifesaving medal, for saving two soldiers who fell through harbor ice.

• Answering critics who called rowing unladylike, she said in effect that she would not watch men drown to keep her dress dry.
• Her last recorded rescue came at 63, when she hauled a friend from the water.
• Official records credit her with 18 lives saved, and local accounts suggest as many as 25.
• When she died on October 24, 1911, every vessel bell in Newport Harbor rang and more than 1,400 people came to her viewing.
• Lime Rock was renamed Ida Lewis Rock in 1924, and in 2018 she became the first woman with a road named for her at Arlington National Cemetery.