Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

The tidal James River below the fall line, between Richmond and the mouth of the James at Hampton Roads, was full of obstructions, shoals, dangerous turns, and strong tides and currents. For many years, stakes that pilots and captains placed each spring to mark shoals and channels were the only aids to navigation on the river. The stakes helped the mariners, who combined their skill and local knowledge with the markers to navigate the river during the day. However, they dared not risk night travel. With their independence from England, the responsibility for navigational lights, buoys, and beacons fell to the new government. The U.S. Congress established the U.S. Lighthouse Service in 1789 to become keepers of the lights. Trinity House’s legacy of maintaining aids to navigation continued, and the Lighthouse Service’s projects included the “necessary support, maintenance, and repairs of all light-houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers erected, placed, or sunk, before the passing of this act at the entrance of or within any bay, inlet, harbor, or port of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof easy and safe, shall be defrayed out of the Treasury of the United States.” This Ninth Act of Congress established federal funding for lighthouses in the entire country and transferred the existing twelve lighthouses built by the British from the individual states to the federal government. By 1800, there were 24 lighthouses in the new nation, all along the Atlantic Coast. 13

Boston Light in a photograph from 1884. Constructed in 1716, it was the first lighthouse built in the Thirteen Colonies. National Archives

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