Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

John Robert Edwards’s telescope

“We would go and stay on the lighthouse but my father would have to look out for the inspector. We had toys there and we would watch the barges go by. He kept the lighthouse very clean and it was lovely—two nice big bedrooms with big high beds and a big kitchen/family room. It had weights to lower the food to be stored in the cool under the lighthouse. The bathroom was set over the water.

“There were some terrible storms out there and I remember the lightening.

“One time he heard loud noises booming around the lighthouse and there was no one there. Could it be a ghost, he wondered, and what would the former lightkeeper, Mr. Curtis, think of his being alarmed?”

John Robert Edwards, born in 1881, joined the Lighthouse Service when he was just 16 and began working at Point of Shoals as an assistant keeper to an older lightkeeper, Thomas H. Curtis. Edwards continued with the Lighthouse Service for 45 solitary years, solitary because most lighthouses did not allow keepers’ families to live aboard. Gerard remembers: “My father was a wonderful man and we’d be sad that we didn’t get to see him too often. Most of the time he worked 30 days and then had a week off—but sometimes in the winter we wouldn’t see him at all. My stepbrother, Riddick, 9 years older than I, was more like a father to me. He spent summers on the lighthouse with my father, but not for pay as a career. “My father never said anything negative about the lighthouse and he liked being able to fish when he was there. My father cooked. He knew all the people on the shore and got eggs and produce from them and got his meat from the store. “He was a quiet man who smoked a pipe constantly—George Washington tobacco— and listened to the radio. The pipe finally got him and he died from lung cancer. “My father bought a home on land but he wouldn’t come into that house unless he thought it was an emergency. That was the only time my parents squabbled and then my mother would row a rowboat out to go and see him.

John Robert Edwards

85

Image by Sheally