A snowstorm was churning the harbor's waters, and the boat overturned. John McLaughlin, were passing through Newport Harbor toward Fort Adams in a small boat, guided by a 14-year-old boy who claimed to know his way through the harbor. Her most famous rescue occurred on March 29, 1869. Illustration of Ida Lewis rowing from book by Phebe Ann Hanaford, copied from earlier print of Grace Darling Lewis made her first rescue in 1854, coming to the assistance of four men whose boat had capsized. The extra pay was given "in consideration of the remarkable services of Mrs. With a salary of $750 per year, Lewis was for a time the highest-paid lighthouse keeper in the nation. Ida finally received the official appointment as keeper in 1879, largely through the efforts of an admirer, General Ambrose Everett Burnside, a Civil War hero who became a Rhode Island governor and United States senator. Her mother eventually died of cancer in 1878. By 1877 her mother's health was failing, leaving Ida with increased housekeeping and care-giving responsibilities. Her mother was then appointed keeper, although Ida continued to do the keeper's work.
Lewis and her mother tended the Lime Rock Light for her father from 1857 until 1873 when he died. Responding to criticism that it was un-ladylike for women to row boats, Lewis said that "None – but a donkey, would consider it 'un-feminine', to save lives." She became very skillful at handling her heavy rowboat. She rowed her younger siblings to school every weekday and fetched supplies from town as they were needed. By age 15, Lewis had become known as the best swimmer in Newport. Since Lime Rock was almost completely surrounded by water, the only way to reach the mainland was by boat. Ida Lewis expanded her domestic duties to include caring for him and a seriously ill sister and also, with her mother's assistance, tending the light: filling the lamp with oil at sundown and again at midnight, trimming the wick, polishing carbon off the reflectors, and extinguishing the light at dawn.
After the family had been at Lime Rock for less than four months, he suffered a stroke and became disabled. Her father was transferred to the Lighthouse Service and appointed keeper of Lime Rock Light on the small near-island Lime Rock in Newport in 1854, taking his family to live on the rock in 1857. Ida Lewis was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the second oldest of four children of Captain Hosea Lewis of the Revenue-Marine.
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