Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

Traditional masonry tower lighthouses dotted New England’s rocky coastline, lighting the way for the great clippers and schooners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Deep harbors and port towns were just a short distance inside the lights. However, farther south, along the Atlantic Coast, the coastal plain becomes wider. Port towns grew on shallower rivers and bays at a greater distance from the ocean. Navigating those inland waters required an additional system of lights and beacons marking miles of waterways to major port cities. The Chesapeake Bay – A Navigational Challenge Wind, Tide, and Shoals Ship pilots and captains entering the James River, Chesapeake Bay, and Carolina sounds used time-tested lead-line methods to measure water depths and then record and map shallows and channels. They used outstanding landmarks, such as prominent trees, bluffs, rocks, and houses, to obtain bearings. Because sailing crafts were at the mercy of tides and wind, riverboat captains and pilots also depended on local knowledge to make safe passage. Oyster rocks as well as shifting shoals of sand and mud made travel up and down river an art.

Old Isle of May Lighthouse

Replica of an early English coal brazier

St. Agnes Brazier circa 1680–1809

Images courtesy of Thomas Tag, U.S. Lighthouse Society

Early Colonial Beacon The first recorded light signal in colonial America was at Nantasket (now Hull), Massachusetts, in 1673. The beacon was a small stone tower on Point Allerton, a promontory guarding the south approach to Boston Harbor. The citizens of that community provided funds to furnish “fier-bales of pitch and ocum” to burn in an iron basket on the top of the tower. 11 First Lighthouses Colonial coastal ports adopted the English system of buoyage and lights as early as 1716. The first lighthouse in the Colonies, on Little Brewster Island near the Boston Harbor, first exhibited its light on September 14, 1716. The British continued to erect a system of lighthouses, along with a few beacons and several cask buoys, and those remained the bulk of American navigational aids until the inception of the Lighthouse Service in 1789. 12

Map of the Chesapeake Bay, 1758. Library of Congress

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