Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

Sadly, Pheby’s request arrived at the lighthouse board on July 26, three days after Robert B. More, 65, was assigned temporarily as acting lightkeeper to Craney Island, with Marshall Sand becoming the acting assistant keeper a few months later. Pheby sold their Virginia Beach property, Woodstock Farm, in 1882 and lived with her daughter, Fannie, and son-in-law, James W. Bacchus, in Norfolk. She moved to live in Portsmouth with another daughter, Ella, and her husband, William Wilder (the “son” mentioned in her letter), before she died in 1910. 5 Prior to the Richards’ tenure, in 1870, William P. Sturtevant served as keeper at Craney Island Light along with his wife, Mary Jane Bell Sturtevant. They had married in 1842, settled in Portsmouth, Virginia, and had 12 children according to Megan Landry of Portsmouth, Virginia. William P. Sturtevant was her third great-grandfather. She noted that his appointment to a federal post was unusual since he had served as first sergeant in the H Company of the Third Virginia Infantry from Portsmouth for six months in 1862 before he was discharged for old age. Perhaps, Landry conjectured, he had Northern sympathies as did, she is fairly certain, his son Charles Henry Sturtevant (who later started the Sturtevant Funeral home in Portsmouth, in 1883). On September 26, 1870, a Lighthouse Service inspector, Commodore Dornin, made a surprise visit to the lighthouse and interviewed the Sturtevants, who reported no problem with the lighthouse equipment or their duties there. The federal register lists Wm. P. Sturtevant as lightkeeper at Old Point Comfort in July 1871, making $600. Miss E. M. Crepper is also listed as keeper at Old Point Comfort, making $400, indicating she was actually the assistant lightkeeper.

That same register shows Mrs. M. S. Sturtevant as lightkeeper at Craney Island Light, making $400 working as assistant lightkeeper in July 1871. 6

The Lighthouse Service also listed Elizabette (or Elizabeth) Remick as a keeper of the light at Burwells Bay in Isle of Wight. Records from Deep Water Shoals Lighthouse indicated that she was paid an annual salary of $180 as a keeper. Her grandson Commander William “Bill” C. Remick (RET) claims, however, that she made her teenage son (his father, Robert Worthington Remick) row a boat out once a week to check on the light, which, by then, had become an automated light on a black steel structure 75 feet tall. In later years, Robert Remick had an insurance company in Smithfield, Virginia.

Bill Remick was born at home in Burwells Bay, an area so rural there were no hospitals nearby and the closest school was seven miles distant.

Commander William “Bill” C. Remick (RET)

“I guess my father was the one to check on the light because there was no one else nearby,” he said.

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