Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

Foster and Stevenson envisioned the lighthouse as a visual feature of Bay Creek’s Bayside Village and the Arnold Palmer golf course. In December 2013, however, Foster gave up the lighthouse in a settlement with his former business partner. At a 2014 auction, John Waller of Virginia Beach, on a whim, made the sole bid—$137,500—for the lighthouse, intending to use it as a family vacation home. The original lighthouse was a residence for the lightkeepers, and the replica followed that plan with the addition of heating and air-conditioning—but no plumbing. However, the opportunity to relax in a setting that harkens back to the days of the lighthouses could justify the extra expense Waller faced to fully equip the structure. Smithfield Station Replica Lighthouse, Smithfield, Virginia A screwpile replica lighthouse sits on the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, at the Smithfield Station hotel, restaurant, and marina. Although there are no screwpilings here, the exterior of the lighthouse replica follows closely the Hooper Strait Lighthouse in St. Michaels, Maryland. Hooper Strait, a square screwpile that first exhibited its fifth-order lens in 1867, was notorious among screwpiles for its 1877 adventure when ice floes sheared the cottage off its base and sent it floating down into the Chesapeake Bay. The keepers escaped but were stranded and frostbitten on the ice for 24 hours with only a small boat for shelter. A new, hexagonal screwpile lighthouse, erected on the same site at Hooper Strait, first lit its lamp in 1879 and felt the effects of the Charleston earthquake of 1886. In 1918, the captain of a passing steamboat reported that the lighthouse was dark, and shortly after that, the keeper’s body was discovered afloat in the strait, apparently after he had fallen from the lighthouse’s platform while making repairs. According to a Lighthouse Digest story, Zebedee Harper, keeper of the light, wrote in the June 8, 1918, logbook that “on the 1st of the present month a very curious sea monster was captured near the Light Station by Capt. Zeb Pritchett the like of which has never been seen by anyone who has examined it. Evidently of the turtle family but in nearly every respect unlike anything of that kind usually seen—no under shell or joints in flippers and top shell in squares running longitudinally—was 7 ft. and 6 inches from tip to tip and estimated to weigh from 800 to 1000 pounds.” 3

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