Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

CHAPTER SIX THE SCREWPILES’ LASTING LEGACY

Restorations In the late 1800s, a dozen screwpile lighthouses helped mariners navigate the rivers and sounds in coastal North Carolina. Of those, only Roanoke River Lighthouse, one of three screwpile lighthouses decommissioned in the early 1940s, remains today. Roanoke River Lighthouse, Edenton, North Carolina The 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse, named for its original service site in the Albemarle Sound, marked the entrance to the Roanoke River near Plymouth, North Carolina. In the 1800s, Plymouth was a major port in the state with 25 sailing ships carrying on a lively trade with foreign ports, including the West Indies. Today, however, the lighthouse overlooks Edenton Bay from its new site in Edenton, North Carolina. While the site might not be original, the structure is an authentic restoration, thanks to the efforts of the State of North Carolina, the Town of Edenton, and the Edenton Historical Commission. After the Civil War, the first Roanoke River Lighthouse displayed its whale-oil-powered light in 1867. When that lighthouse burned in 1885, the Lighthouse Board replaced it with another screwpile lighthouse a few months later. Five months later however, in January 1886, the Albemarle Sound froze over and an ice floe knocked the lighthouse off its pilings, partially submerging it in the sound. A third Roanoke River Lighthouse, a two story, square cottage with a light tower at one corner and equipped with a fourth-order Fresnel lens, opened in 1887. That structure served until its decommissioning in 1941.

The screwpile lighthouse’s quaint styling and cozy charm conjures up visions of a peaceful life on the water, but the reality of screwpile lighthouses included long, often isolated, days of manual labor and watchful dedication to the light and the foghorn or bell. More dramatic were the threats of perilous storms that could shake, disable, or destroy the lighthouse. On numerous occasions, lightkeepers braved the storms, putting their own lives at risk to save endangered mariners. Ice floes were the biggest nemesis of the screwpiles, and a number of the lighthouses suffered severe damage. Gradually, the U.S. Lighthouse Service decommissioned and/ or demolished the surviving lighthouses and replaced them with automatic beacons. Thanks to Willard Forbes, grandson of Joseph Mercer (who was a lightkeeper on both the Wade Point and North River Lighthouses in North Carolina), we have a personal view of the history of the screwpile lighthouses in that area. Along with his distant cousin and close friend, Alex Leary, a retired educator, Forbes shared recollections of Mercer and the lighthouses with community programs in northeast North Carolina. Forbes, who was born in Old Trap, North Carolina, also left an oral history with the Outer Banks History Center a few years before he died at age 94 in February 2012. Leary, who also lives in Old Trap, has continued in Forbes’s tradition of sharing the lighthouses’ histories.

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