Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

Hazards of Lightkeeping Perilous conditions were an understood liability in lightkeepers’ careers.

Thimble Shoal Light had a colorful history of misadventures. Thimble Shoal is a shallow area just three and one-half miles from the entrance to Hampton Roads and the mouth of the James River. The shoal was known also as Horseshoe Shoal when a lightship was located on the “tail of the horseshoe,” on the northeast edge of the channel approaching Old Point Comfort. In 1872, a hexagonal screwpile lighthouse replaced the lightship, but fire destroyed the lighthouse on October 30, 1880, leaving only the ironwork. The Lazaretto Depot, a prefabricator of the lighthouse cottages, sent a new replacement light that was lit just two months later. Sadly, in March 1891, a steamer rammed and damaged the second lighthouse. Then, in 1898, a coal barge rammed the light, causing even more extensive damage—but the worst was yet to come. On December 27, 1909, snow pelted the Hampton Roads area of Virginia while wind whipped the waters. According to historian Robert Burgess, the four-masted schooner Malcom Baxter, Jr ., sailing from Boston to Norfolk, was taken in tow off the Virginia Capes by the tug John Twohy, Jr . about 6 a.m. that day. The schooner, pulled by about 450 feet of line, followed the tug. The weather cleared with a flood tide (incoming) and wind west by southwest. The tug released the schooner and set it adrift. The tide and wind sent the schooner into the Thimble Shoal Lighthouse. The schooner’s jibboom struck the lighthouse and the bow crashed up against the structure. She drifted clear and anchored nearby. The wooden housing of the lighthouse ignited into flames when the stove in the keeper’s quarters overturned and set aflame the oil used for the lamp. Assistant lighthouse keepers J. B. Thomas and T. L. Faulcher abandoned their station, lowered a lifeboat, and rowed into the storm, away from the blazing remains of the lighthouse. Captain Hudgins, lighthouse keeper, was on a leave of absence at his home in Mathews County, Virginia. Burgess notes that a rescue crew from the United States cruiser Birmingham, then anchored in Hampton Roads, plucked the two assistant keepers, uninjured, from their lifeboat. 7 The Lighthouse Service installed an automated light on what remained of the screwpile’s foundation, and in 1914, they commissioned a new lighthouse, a “sparkplug” model, on the same location.

Lightkeeper Robert Worthington Remick

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