Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

Roanoke River Replica Lighthouse, Plymouth, North Carolina When the Town of Plymouth could not afford to buy the dilapidated Roanoke River Lighthouse, the Port o’ Plymouth Museum and the Washington County Roanoke River Commission decided to build a replica of the 1866 Roanoke River Lighthouse along the banks of the Roanoke River. Using original plans and major federal funding, the project launched in 2001. Today, the replica lighthouse and a maritime museum stand together to preserve and promote the area’s maritime history. 1 North River Lighthouse, Rodanthe, North Carolina The 1866 North River Lighthouse also technically survives, but few recognize the old lighthouse in its new life as the Rodanthe Community Center on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Ice literally cut the legs out from underneath the North River Lighthouse when the Albemarle Sound froze in 1917. Although it fell into shallow water, the lighthouse continued to serve for another year. In 1920, the Coast Guard sold the building for $150 to the superintendent of the Dare County Schools to use as a school in Rodanthe. The school served children in grades one to 10 until 1951 when the school closed. The children of all the Hatteras Island villages then went to the first consolidated school in Buxton, North Carolina, and the school became a community center. In 1993, the building was expanded, renovated, and painted dark gray, almost completely concealing its history as a lighthouse. Even Forbes had to crawl underneath the building to check the structure to ascertain that it was truly the old North River Lighthouse. 2 Hooper Strait Lighthouse, St. Michaels, Maryland In Maryland, screwpile lighthouses from Hooper Strait, Seven Foot Knoll, Drum Point, and Thomas Point Shoal survive, but only Thomas Point is still in its original location. The other three were relocated to other sites in the state: the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse to Pier 5 on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor waterfront, the Drum Point Lighthouse to the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, and the Hooper Strait Lighthouse to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. The first Hooper Strait screwpile lighthouse, built in 1867, stood at the mouth of Tangier Sound, about 39 miles south of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Cast iron sleeved the lighthouse’s wooden pilings, but even iron failed to ward off the ice floes that knocked the lighthouse off its screwpile foundation in January 1877. Light tenders later found the devastated lighthouse sunk in the waters about five miles south of Hooper Strait.

Boat hanger on the Hooper Strait screwpile lighthouse Image by Sheally

164