Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

The hexagonal screwpile lighthouse first lit Stingray Point in 1858 and extinguished its light in 1965.

Hurd, a member of the Lynchburg College Sports Hall of Fame, taught and coached at Amelia High in Amelia, Virginia, before enlisting in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1941. He trained pilots stateside in open-cockpit planes until he requested a transfer to combat duty. He flew dive-bombers in the Pacific and then became one of the Hell Razors and flew in the first group of U.S. Navy planes to bomb Tokyo. A too-close encounter with a Japanese fighter near the island of Chichi Jima forced him to ditch the plane. Rescuers saved Hurd, much as they had former U.S. president George H. W. Bush, and Hurd received the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, Hurd, who was born in the house his grandfather built in 1875, returned home to Deltaville where his father was a farmer, iceman, and had the hardware store in town. Hurd shared his memories of Stingray Point. “Boat building was the biggest thing here. We have about 1,000 full-time residents but we’ve got more boats than people. “My father had a boat and when family visited, it was a highlight to get into the boat and go to the lighthouse. The lightkeepers were always glad to see people and treated us royally. They were required to welcome and feed visitors on Sundays. I remember Enos Brooks and other lightkeepers named Levi Marchant, Saunders, and one named Werner who married a girl from Deltaville. “The first floor of the lighthouse was for tying up the boats and for storage. The second floor was for living and the third floor was the light. You went up into the lighthouse through a hatch. As a young boy, I was glad I didn’t have to stay out there all the time. I was always surprised at how well they kept it and the size of the light. “People in Deltaville didn’t think that much about the lighthouse being unusual—it was just necessary to have it for navigation. We used to ship livestock on the steamers that ran to Baltimore from here.” “When I was 12, a neighbor, a big robust 18 year old, used to walk and swim to the lighthouse from the point. It was a sign of manhood. You could walk it at low tide.

Circulating libraries moved from lighthouse to lighthouse.

Marchant’s wife and family lived with him on Little Watts Island when he served at the lighthouse there. That lighthouse was a masonry tower built in 1833 and had a keeper’s cottage. The family tired of the isolated island life, and when Marchant transferred to Stingray Point, they lived nearby on the mainland. “During the 32 years I remained at Stingray Point,” Marchant told the Baltimore Sun , “the life was somewhat lonesome, but the light station is furnished with a library of about 60 books. After the work of the day was over I spent the rest of the day in reading. The libraries are exchanged from station to station about every three months, so I did not have to read the same books over. “During my long time in the Lighthouse Service, I have not been sick a single day and have not lost a day’s pay. The secret of my good health is that I have been where the doctors could not get to me. “During very stormy weather, with the sea running high, the station at Stingray Point shook badly,” Marchant added. “It is supported by six small iron piles and I have seen it sway back and forth like a rocking chair. The most lonesome time I experienced was during the winter of 1912, when I was alone for 30 days in a freeze. The station shook while the ice was drifting around the station and the Chesapeake was covered with ice as far as the eye could see. No kinds of boats were passing and there was nothing to see but fields of ice.”

Levi “Larry” D. Marchant served at Stingray Point for 32 years, one of the longest tenures in the same lighthouse. 10

The lighthouse was deactivated in 1965.

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