Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

In 1955, Elijah Tate, a waterman and former Lighthouse Service employee, made a deal to buy and salvage the Roanoke River, Wade Point, and Roanoke Marshes Lighthouses for $10 each. He planned to transport them by barge. According to Forbes, when Tate attempted to salvage the Wade Point Lighthouse from its site in the Pasquotank River, the structure slipped from the barge and sank, with pieces of its wood planking drifting downstream to the shore. The Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse, at the southern entrance to the Croatan Sound near Wanchese, met the same fate when Tate attempted to move it. Discouraged, Tate sold the Roanoke River Lighthouse to Emmett Wiggins, who operated a tugboat and owned a marine salvage business. Wiggins was more adept at salvage, and he used an old Landing Craft Infantry (LCI), an amphibious assault ship, as a barge. By cutting just a few of the lighthouse pilings and partially submerging the barge, he could float beneath the lighthouse cottage and then raise the barge up, supporting the structure while he cut away the remaining pilings. Wiggins brought the lighthouse across the Albemarle Bay to his property just west of Edenton. There, he sank the barge at the shoreline, used riprap to provide a solid footing for the lighthouse, and then moved in and made it his home. He lived there for 35 years until he died in 1995. The town of Plymouth, North Carolina, wanted to buy the lighthouse to use as a waterfront marine museum, but Wiggins died before they settled on a deal. His heirs set an asking price of $1 million, much more than Plymouth could afford. Instead, the town opted to build an accurate replica of the first (1866) Roanoke River Lighthouse. Eight years after Wiggins’s death, Hurricane Isabel hit Edenton with a fury that left his lighthouse barely standing. In 2007, the Edenton Historical Commission persuaded Wiggins’s heirs to sell the derelict structure for $225,000. Another $75,000 went to moving the lighthouse, by barge, to the downtown Edenton waterfront. The exterior restoration of the lighthouse began in April 2010 with the replacement of the old roof with the same material used in 1886. Craftsmen removed and restored each of the windows and doors and then reinstalled them. The interior restoration was finished in 2014 with the addition of period-correct furnishings. The lighthouse is now open to the public.

Roanoke River screwpile lighthouse when it was home to Emmett Wiggins

Image by Sheally

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