Another chapter began this week in the long story of the Gay Head Light, which following weeks of preparation and publicity embarked on a slow journey away from the edge of a rapidly eroding cliff.

More than two years in the planning, the project to move the brick lighthouse that dates to 1856 has captured attention and imagination far beyond the famous clay cliffs that are themselves a national landmark. And so many have pitched in with their hearts and their wallets, from runners along Moshup Trail in a 10K road race last October, to voters in every Island town who agreed to commit Community Preservation Act funding to the cause, to the group of second and third graders from the Chilmark School who stood at the site Thursday morning in a light drizzle, ready with hand-written questions they had prepared in advance.

“We’re going to fix it up so it looks like the day it was built,” Len Butler, a longtime Gay Header who has led the town committee to move the lighthouse, told the school kids. “It’s amazing what’s been done in just two years,” he said a short time later during a news conference, with people applauding and a helicopter circling overhead.

Then with the sound of a compressor kicking into gear, the lighthouse began its move some hundred and twenty nine feet across the bluff, expertly maneuvered by the professionals at International Chimney Corporation and Expert House Movers. Excavation and preparation work over the past few weeks has been exhaustive; the actual move is expected to be complete by the end of the weekend.

The birth of the Gay Head Light dates to 1799 when President John Adams commissioned the building of an eight-sided wooden lighthouse. In 1856 the original wooden structure was replaced by the brick tower that survives today. It is the oldest lighthouse on the Vineyard, followed by the Cape Pogue Light, a wooden tower that dates to 1893 and until this week was the last lighthouse on the Vineyard to be relocated. In January 1987 the Cape Pogue Light was moved by the U.S. Coast Guard using a sky crane helicopter. At the time the lighthouse stood just thirteen feet from the edge of a steep, sandy cliff.

When the Gay Head Light move began yesterday, that lighthouse stood forty-six feet from the edge. Both these beloved icons have stood on the front lines of erosion as the sea continues its never-ending assault on the land.

The late Will Monast, a columnist for this newspaper who as a young man worked the fishing boats out of New Bedford, recalled his own love affair with the lighthouse that for more than two hundred years has guided mariners and fishermen from around the world safely past the cliffs and the treacherous, rocky ledge known as Devil’s Bridge that lies below. “The Gay Head Light was always there to wish us a safe return, a welcome home or a needed point of reference pulling a trap when the sea was so high it was the only thing visible above water,” he wrote in 2013. “The lighthouse has meant so much to many . . . . We have an opportunity to save one of the most endangered places in the country but we have very little time to do so.”

Now the circle is nearly complete. In a few short days the Gay Head Light will be settling onto a freshly-poured concrete foundation, ready to stand sentinel and flash her warning beacon to mariners for generations to come. This is a piece of history worth preserving, and thanks to a community of support, there is a bright future for the Gay Head Light.