Before recorded history began, people went out upon the waters of the world. They made stone age boats from modest materials, animal skins, bones, tree limbs and bark. Tribal villagers kept fires burning in the village to discourage predators and to provide night time light for the village. Daring to fish at night, early sailors noticed that the fires led them back to the village shore. Soon fires were set on the shore just to light the way for people fishing in the dark. From these humble beginnings lighthouses have developed through time and human ingenuity into the monumental towers of today, lighting the coasts and maritime hazards of the entire world. Lighthouses have become powerful symbols representing a nation's pride, engineering skill, economic wealth and naval power.
The symbol of the lighthouse has slipped into the collective unconscious memory of humanity. Few can mention lighthouses without evoking an image so vivid, so similar in everyone's perception. A solitary masonry tower stands calmly aloof and enduring in a wave-battered sea. The brilliant lantern light sweeps the horizon, dancing across foaming waves and spray. A momentary white glow accents the wave tops only to drop into the dark sea when the light passes. A distant ship briefly lit, sails full in the face of a gale, passes along the coast safely remote from danger. Some people think lighthouses are no longer necessary. With the coming of RADAR, SONAR, radio navigation, and most recently, Global Position Satellite navigation, mariners can establish a vessel's position accurately within a few feet. Large ocean going commercial ships may not need lighthouses. Still, nothing is more reassuring than to make a landfall and see the lighthouse where they expect it. When the crew sees the lighthouse, they are then certain that the onboard electronic navigational gear is working properly.
Local watermen rely on lighthouses to guide them home after being out of sight of land following the catch. Working fishing boats float at the whim of current, tide, and breeze. Their captains often rely more on experience, instinct, and luck than expensive position finding equipment. Inexperienced boaters with little regular experience in electronic navigation find it easier to navigate by landmarks. Lighthouses are the best landmarks. Eventually if not sooner moist salt air invades every space aboard smaller vessels and rapidly destroys sensitive electronic gear. This is an unnecessary expense for most boaters when a lighthouse provides all the help required.
The Cape Lookout Lighthouse is listed visible for twenty-five miles. Drum Inlet is nineteen-and-a-half miles north of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. Barden Inlet is right beside the lighthouse. Beaufort Inlet and Morehead City Port are about ten miles from the lighthouse. Three major recreational, commercial and sport boat ocean inlets, North Carolina's second largest commercial port, countless marinas, and many vessels passing around the treacherous twenty-one miles long Cape Lookout Shoals. Everyone relies on the lighthouse to be there and to be lit. Annually, several hundred thousand boats and ships navigate safely because of the lighthouse.
Why have ships sailed so close to shore that they were in danger of running onto the shoals? Were they worried by being out of sight of land? Plainly put, vessels are taking advantage of the very dangers they wish to avoid. North Carolina's shoals turn the Gulf Stream east away from the land. The Gulf Stream is a great river within the Atlantic Ocean. Flowing at three to four miles per hour and it carries more water than all the worlds' rivers combined. Ben Franklin was the first to quantify and understand the Gulf Stream's nature. Southbound sailing ships needed to stay close to shore to avoid the Gulf Stream current. Even today motor vessels avoid sailing against the Gulf Stream to save fuel.
In winter a prevailing north wind and the Labrador Current help southbound ships. The Labrador Current rises close to shore in winter and flows south at two to three miles per hour. A vessel bound from Virginia to Charleston could make the winter passage in three days. Ships hugged the coast to take advantage of these favorable winds and currents. More shipwrecks occurred on southbound voyages. In summer without favorable conditions the same average southbound passage was three weeks. Some voyages took two months. Much of the rest of the year the Labrador current runs under the Gulf Stream. The winds prevail out of the southwest and the Gulf Stream is closer to shore. During unfavorable winds ships would anchor offshore in waters deep enough to be safe but protected by the Cape Lookout Shoals. The white checkered sides of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse showed where anchoring was safe.
Despite wind direction, all northbound vessels have easier passages than southbound vessels. Ships sailing north have a wider shipping lane farther offshore. Sailing vessels can make wide tacks against the wind and still manage to make progress, the Gulf Stream pushing their hull along. Most of the year winds prevail out of the south making northbound passages cheaper, shorter, and safer. A record 19th century sailing voyage from Charleston to Virginia took eighteen hours.
Lighthouses enjoy increasing popularity as cultural attractions, national monuments, and vacation destinations. Visitors to lighthouses spend millions of tourist dollars supporting local economies. Congress established the US Lighthouse Service to support commerce. Who then could have foreseen the other ways lighthouses would come to promote the economy?
The lighthouse service established Cape Lookout Lightstation both to mark Cape Lookout Shoals and as part of the North Carolina coastal system of lighthouses. Each coastal light station is roughly forty miles from the next. Ships would get out of sight of the last light just as the next light came into view. North Carolina's lighthouses "hand-off," pass ships on from one lighthouse to the next, along the treacherous passage of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Consequently this text includes related history of the US Lighthouse Service and North Carolina Lightstations.
This booklet has been prepared to answer overwhelming requests for accurate and thorough information about the Cape Lookout Lighthouse.
Egyptians built the first recorded lighthouse at the harbor entrance to Alexandria, Egypt. First lit in 331 BC, the Pharos tower stood four-hundred-fifty feet tall. Fires burned at the top for a thousand years. The tower stood until a fourteenth century earthquake destroyed it. Archeological divers recently rediscovered the remains underwater in the modern Alexandria harbor. Contemporaries claim it was visible forty-five miles. The Pharos Lighthouse is a Wonder of the Ancient World. Early European civilizations built lighthouses throughout Europe. They called them Pharos, not lighthouse. Only rubble remains of a few that survive to this day. Soon after Columbus discovered the New World, a growing fleet of sailing ships first explored and then began planting colonies along the coast. Seeking fame and fortune, exaggerated claims of riches lured many to migrate to the untouched American wilderness. The first documented ship wreck in the Graveyard of the Atlantic occurred in 1526 at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.
England attempted settlements in the New World as early as Raleigh's 1584 expedition. This was the first expedition to Manteo. A year later, the 1585 expedition stopped on Core Banks near the present Cape Lookout Lighthouse for water and repairs. The 1587 Raleigh expedition to Manteo became known as the Lost Colony. On May 13, 1607, Jamestown, Virginia was founded. After twelve years of fits and starts, the colony began to thrive, becoming the first permanent American English settlement. By 1619, the boom was on, settlers migrated as fast as ships could carry them. Goods grown in the colonies began to flood into English ports. Ships needed beacons to mark the dangers and lead the way.
Eddystone Reef Lighthouse off Cornwall, England, and fourteen miles southwest of Plymouth, the busiest colonial English port, was the first of many modern European light stations. Eddystone Lighthouse was originally lit in 1698. The present-day tower is the fourth lighthouse tower at the Eddystone Reef Station.
During the Colonial Period, no institution existed for establishing lighthouses in America. A genuine need was not enough for the English Parliament to act, especially in the colonies. Locally available financing was the single motivating force for building beacons. In June 1715, the Massachusetts Bay Colonial Assembly authorized funding for the first lighthouse built within the current boundary of the United States.
Dues financed the first Boston lighthouse, collected from all ships and boats clearing Boston Harbor. It was constructed on Beacon Island and lit on September 14, 1716. They hired George Worthylake to keep the lighthouse for fifty pounds a year. At the time, the average annual salary for skilled workers was about twelve pounds. The tower survived until June 13, 1776. Annoyed by losses, the British fleet retreated from Boston Harbor, blowing the tower apart with gunpowder as they left.
Rebuilt in 1783, the Beacon Island Tower was raised to eighty-nine feet in 1859. Little Brewster Island is now the island's name. It is the oldest operating light station in the United States. Congress decided in 1989 that they would permanently man and never automate the station. The Coast Guard operates the station with the surviving original equipment.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, eleven lighthouses were in the American Colonies, three more were under construction, and Treasury bought materials for one other. The war disrupted all new construction. England and the United States signed the peace treaty in 1783, afterwards lighthouse construction projects resumed.
The North Carolina State Assembly authorized the first light station for North Carolina in 1784. Bald Head Light Station was lit in 1789 at a cost of $7,359. It was lost to erosion in 1813. A second light station authorized by the State Assembly in 1789 did not get built. Right after they passed the legislation but before they awarded the contract, Congress assumed federal control of navigational aids.
Congress met for the first time on March 4, 1789. On August 7, 1789, they passed the first act relating to lighthouses. An act providing for the establishment of lighthouses and "in the necessary support, maintenance and repairs of all lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers, erected, placed, or sunk . . . at the entrance of, or within any bay, inlet, harbor, or port of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof easy and safe . . . (and will) be defrayed out of the Treasury of the United States." In September 1789, before adjourning, Congress established the Department of the Treasury. President George Washington instantly appointed Alexander Hamilton to be the first Secretary of the Treasury.
Hamilton personally supervised all aids to navigation, and became the first Superintendent of the lighthouse service. In addition, President Washington, Vice President and later President John Adams, and Secretary of State and later President Thomas Jefferson, approved new lighthouse contracts, and personnel appointments to lighthouses.
The Treasury in 1792, created the office of the Commissioner of Revenue within the Treasury. Hamilton transferred supervision of navigation aids to Commissioner of Revenue, Trench Coxe. Commissioner Coxe was often onsite during lighthouse construction, most notably the first Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
Hamilton resigned from the Treasury on January 31, 1795. He died late on July 12, 1804 from wounds received in a duel with his bitter political enemy Aaron Burr. Albert Gallatin replaced Hamilton in 1801. The next year, 1802, Treasury abolished the short-lived office of Commissioner of Revenue.
Congress authorized two new light stations for North Carolina in 1794, the first Cape Hatteras Light Station, and the first of many for Ocracoke Inlet on nearby Shell Castle Island. The light stations of Ocracoke Inlet were harbor lights and not coastal lights. However, mariners rely on the Ocracoke Lighthouse to mark the middle of the reach between Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout. Construction of the Cape Hatteras station began in 1799. Completed in 1802, the tower was first lit in 1803. Standing ninety feet tall topped by a ten-foot high lantern enclosure, the tower stood atop a stone foundation buried in the sand thirteen feet deep. The Shell Castle Island Lighthouse also became operational in 1803. Head lighthouse keepers then earned $200 - $250 a year.
By 1803, wanting a comprehensive plan for organizing the lighthouse service, Congress appropriated $5,000 for a committee to study the difficulty of establishing lights for the Eastern Seaboard. Meanwhile, Congress authorized a light station for Cape Lookout in 1804. The deed recorded in February 1805 by Joseph Fulford and Elijah Piggot transferred four acres to the U.S. Government for the Cape Lookout Light Station. The lighthouse was finished before the outbreak of America's second war in 1812. It cost $20, 678 to build, including dependent buildings.
That first Cape Lookout Tower must have been the kind of creation only a mother could love. No recorded descriptions were ever favorable, and even the bare statistics do not seem very attractive. Built on an eight-foot tall dune, the tower was ninety-six feet high including the lantern enclosure, totaling one-hundred-four feet above the surrounding sand. Its walls were hexagonal shaped with a brick tower inside a wooden building. The exterior was clad with cedar shingles, and painted as a day-mark in red and white stripes. Originally spider lamps burned in the lantern but they were too weak, and the lantern elevation was too low to be effective. From the first lighting, seafarers' complaints were frequent and vocal. Ship Captains' main complaint was that they were in greater danger of wrecking from seeking the light than any danger it marked.
The original lighthouse lighting apparatus was simple. A series of spider lamps was placed on shelves. Each lamp had a pan of whale oil with four solid wicks suspended from the sides. Visible eleven miles during ideal weather conditions, typically the Cape Lookout Light was visible less than nine miles away. Cape Lookout Shoals extend twenty-one miles south from Cape Point. Fourteen miles south of Cape Point, the shoals are deep enough for most ships to pass over them safely. The tower is four miles north of Cape Point. A safe passage around the shoals was nineteen miles away from the lighthouse. Consequently, lighthouses needed better lamps.
Winslow Lewis patented a new light system, a "reflecting and magnifying lantern" for lighthouses in 1810. He combined Ami Argand's 1781 lamp invention with parabolic shaped, silvered plate copper reflectors. A nine-inch diameter lens was set in a copper rim a few inches in front of the lamps. For a brighter light, each lamp had multiple hollow wicks, as many as ten wicks set in concentric rings. Multiple lamps, lenses, and reflector frames were added to increase brightness to the desired intensity. European lighthouses had already adopted a superior and suspiciously identical invention by 1789.
Lewis proposed to Secretary Gallatin to outfit all forty-nine of the country's lighthouses with his invention for $26,950. Gallatin persuaded Congress to act. In 1812 Congress approved $60,000 for purchasing the Lewis patent, for him to outfit all the lighthouses, and to maintain them for seven years. Lewis finished installation at all fifty existing light stations late in 1815. The Cape Lookout Lighthouse received thirteen Lewis lamps. A fixed light needed twenty-six reflectors per lamp to show all around the horizon. The Cape Lookout Lighthouse exhibited a fixed light.
Congress authorized a new lighthouse for the Bald Head Island Light Station in 1814, one year after the old one fell into the inlet. First lit in 1817 with fifteen Lewis lamps, it stands inactive today. One-hundred-ten feet tall, the Old Baldy Foundation is restoring the tower.
At first, the Lewis lamps were brighter than the spider lamps, if keepers properly maintained them, few were. Many problems plagued the new lamps. Inferior glass and poor quality lenses served to decrease the light rather than magnify. The reflectors were manufactured closer to spherical shape than parabolic. Critics described the reflectors' shape as more like a wash basin or barber's bowl. Even normal use distorted the thin gauged copper-sheet metal reflectors. The reflective silver plating was so thin it wore away. Wiser lighthouse keepers ignored the instructions to use "Tripoli powder" for polishing the reflectors and lenses, but the reflective plating only lasted a little longer. Tripoli powder was a harsh abrasive popular for polishing metal. The lighthouse service issued the polishing powder to the keepers and they were supposed to use it. By 1852, the Lighthouse Board banned use of Tripoli powder for use in all lighthouses. However, scratched lenses and bare copper reflectors were more common than not in lighthouses, many even before Lewis's contract expired. Nevertheless, more significant to Congress, the lamps required half as much fuel to provide about the same amount of light.
Congress gave praise to the Treasury for administering the lighthouse service on time and on budget, very significant to a developing nation with severe budgetary limitations. Lewis's acceptance into the lighthouse establishment developed into a long and unfortunate relationship that delayed introduction of the latest advancements in lighthouse technology.
In 1820 with growing responsibilities and overburdened bureaucrats the Treasury created five auditor positions reporting to and working under the Secretary of the Treasury. He appointed Stephen Pleasonton to the Fifth Auditor's Office. The Fifth Auditor was also Superintendent of Navigation Aids. He was mainly responsible for oversight of American financial affairs. His duties included managing the foreign diplomatic, and consular banking accounts of the US Government. In addition, he had to supervise the home accounts of the Department of State, the Patent Office, the Census, Boundary Commissioners, and claims adjustments with foreign governments.
While Pleasonton had extensive accounting experience, he had no practical knowledge of anything nautical. He inherited Winslow Lewis as advisor and manager of the lighthouse service. Sadly, Pleasonton relied almost exclusively on Lewis's self-interested advice for thirty years.
Augustin Jean Fresnel, a French physicist, invented, but was unable to patent, the Fresnel Lens System in 1822. Fresnel developed the lens while he was an army civil engineer, and so the invention became the state property of France. By 1830, knowledge of the new lighthouse apparatus was available to Pleasonton. Nevertheless, he and more significantly, Lewis stubbornly refused to consider adoption.
Also, in 1822 Congress authorized the current light station at Ocracoke to replace the Shell Castle Island Lighthouse. A lightning strike August 16, 1818 destroyed the Shell Castle Island Lighthouse. Already encroaching waters made Shell Castle Island unsuitable for a new lighthouse and local commercial interests were no longer able to influence the decision. Shell Castle Island has long since passed under the waters of the Pamlico Sound. Congress appropriated $20,000 for the Ocracoke Station but cost $11,409.35 including two acres of land and the Keepers Quarters. Wonder what happened to the surplus? Finished and lit in 1823 the focal plane of the light is seventy-five feet high.
With passable lights marking Diamond Shoals (Cape Hatteras), Cape Lookout Shoals and Frying Pan Shoals (Cape Fear), Congress authorized a light station for Bodie Island. In 1837, $5,000 was appropriated for construction. Delays from site selection postponed construction until 1847 and finally cost $11,100 including property, quarters, and storage buildings. The tower was a circular brick structure fifty-four feet tall, seventeen feet in diameter at the base, and one and a-half feet in diameter at the top. It looked like an upside down ice cream cone. Winslow Lewis installed the lighthouse lantern, ( the lantern is the entire apparatus and enclosure at the top of lighthouses) ten feet in diameter and ten feet tall at the top for $2,350.
First lit in spring 1848, workers built the Bodie Island Tower without the recommended pilings and it only had a shallow brick foundation. About a year later, the district inspector discovered that the tower leaned east'ard. The foundation had settled in the muddy sand and the east side was a foot below the west side. Because of the tilt, the delicately balanced clockwork mechanism rotating the fifteen lamps and reflectors operated erratically if at all. The tower continued to wobble in spite of extensive efforts to stabilize the foundation. Eventually abandoned, the Lighthouse Board replaced the tower in 1859 at a cost of $25,000.
Congress insisted in 1838 that Pleasonton begin experimenting with the Fresnel Lens System. Pleasonton bought two lenses from France and had them installed in 1840 at the twin towers of Navesink Light Station, in New Jersey. As late as 1851 Pleasonton was still recommending Congress delay adoption pending further study, probably as a residue of Lewis's influence. Winslow Lewis died May 20, 1850, having been involved for thirty-eight years in every major lighthouse project since 1812. Just ten months before Congress began a widespread investigation of the lighthouse service.
Fresnel designed four Fresnel Lens sizes, called "orders," depending on the number of wicks in each lamp. A 4th order lens lamp had one wick and a 1st order lens had four wicks. After his death in 1857 other sizes were added. In the United States six orders were standard. The 1st order lens was the largest and was typically installed in seacoast towers. Fresnel Lenses surrounded the lamps with concentric glass prisms that reflected the lamp light to the focal plane of the bulls-eye lens. Ultimately, Fresnel's Lens System transmitted 83 percent of the available light. Lewis's system emitted only 16 percent of the light. Fresnel Lenses typically doubled the light's power and halved the fuel consumption, resulting in a fourfold improvement.
Ignoring Pleasonton's advice, Congress authorized the Treasury to adopt the Fresnel Lens in 1851. Cape Lookout was an early recipient of the new system. In 1852 the Lighthouse Board ordered a 1st order lens installed in 1856 for the old Cape Lookout Tower. They raised the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse fifty feet and installed its 1st order lens a year earlier. Bald Head Island also got a 1st order lens in 1851. Finally, Captains rated two coastal North Carolina lighthouses as satisfactory. Cape Lookout though much improved by the new lens was still not sufficient to the task. The Cape Lookout Tower was simply too short. Unlike Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the Cape Lookout Tower was too fragile to support added height.
Coastal North Carolina lighthouses needed to display the light one-hundred-fifty feet high to be visible above the surface haze. All along the coast, high winds raise a salt spray that hangs suspended fifty feet in the air. At dawn and dusk the haze can be nearly opaque from a few miles offshore.
Frustrated by complaints, embarrassed at the U. S. position compared with other nations' lighthouse services, and an overall dissatisfaction with the whole lighthouse service, Congress finally and decidedly acted. A Congressional lighthouse authorization bill of March 3, 1851 convened a board of seven senior military and civil service officers. They commanded the board to examine every aspect of the lighthouse service, to make a detailed report and recommend a program to guide legislation for improving the entire service.
They submitted the report, seven hundred pages, to the Treasury Secretary by January 1852. Filled with precise and bitter criticisms the report first shocked Congress. The report was so direct and to the point, Congress was forced to suffer the report as written. Never has a more embarrassing review of American government affairs occurred. The report specifically suggested that there existed no system of management in the lighthouse service, and that Congress was responsible for allowing the defect to occur and continue. That was enough, Congress created a permanent Light House Board on October 9, 1852, only twenty months after recognizing the problem.
Congress then relieved Pleasonton with the grateful thanks of the nation for his devoted service. To his credit in 1820 when Pleasonton began, fifty-five lighthouses existed in the United States. When he was relieved there were three-hundred, thirty-one light towers and forty-two light ships, and many other buoys and beacons. He accomplished all of this operating within the meager budget provided by Congress.
The most obvious aspect of the Light House Board report first corrected by Congress was fiscal policy. Congress was no longer satisfied with light stations built by the lowest bidder, typically Winslow Lewis low-balling competitors to drive them out of the market. Cost became secondary to structure design and construction. The Light House Board applied new engineering standards and progressive design ideas to overcome the crumbling character of Lewis's towers. With a will born from a fresh start and increased funding, construction of new towers began without any of the obstacles that crippled earlier towers.
They authorized new light towers in 1857 for Bodie Island Light Station, and the current Cape Lookout Light Station Tower. Both towers were finished in 1859, within two years of authorization. The Bodie Island Light was lit on July 1, 1859, eighty feet high with a new 3rd order lens, visibility was fifteen miles. Cape Lookout was lit November 1, 1859. They installed the 1st order lens from the old tower in the new tower, visibility increased to nineteen miles. Experts and lay persons alike widely praised the Cape Lookout tower design. It became the prototype of later lighthouses on the Outer Banks. At long last, after seventy years, the North Carolina coast was finally "adequately to well lit."
A year and a-half later, the lighthouses began to go out. The outbreak of the War of Northern Aggression, the South's name for the American Civil War, brought an immediate military necessity to the lighthouse service. War began with South Carolina's secession on December 20, 1860. The first hostile action occurred in South Carolina at Fort Sumter on January 9, 1861. North Carolina's secession passed the State Assembly on May 20, 1861. Confederate forces hastily occupied the Outer Banks and its lighthouses and forts.
While Confederate forces held the coastal defenses, the lighthouses were necessary to mark the passage for ships transporting vital materials for the war effort. When Union forces advanced on their positions, the Confederates wished to deny the lighthouses to the Northern Aggressors.
In August 1861 following a two-day battle with a Union fleet, Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark surrendered. In September after a heavy Union bombardment, Fort Ocracoke fell. Retreating Confederate survivors destroyed the 4th order lens. The Ocracoke Lighthouse was the first light extinguished. Union forces installed a new 4th order lens in 1864. Another 4th order lens installed in 1899, is the present optical apparatus.
That same September 1861 at Fort Oregon, the Confederate forces expected all of Hatteras Island soon to fall into Union hands. They successfully blew apart the new Bodie Island Tower, in November 1861. Then retreated down the Banks ahead of advancing Union troops in what historians have called the "Chicamacomico Races." Before evacuating the Northern Outer Banks completely, the Confederate soldiers removed the lens and lantern from the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and wrecked the lighting equipment. Union forces restored the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in June 1862 with a 2nd order lens. In 1863, it was upgraded to a 1st order lens. Early in 1862 Fort Roanoke had fallen, by winters end the entire northern coast had passed into Union control.
Next Union forces fresh from victories on the north coast attacked the middle coast. Better fortifications at Beaufort Inlet dominated the middle coast. Battle plans required months of preparation. Union soldiers and material arrived overland from New Bern. Paddle-wheel, gun ships assembled offshore and mortar barges floated down the sounds to take position in Shackleford Slue. The siege of Fort Macon began from land and sea in March 1862. After a major offensive campaign Fort Macon surrendered in April 1862. Again doing their worst, retreating Confederate survivors disabled all the beacons on Bogue Banks. They were less successful at Cape Lookout but still effective. The Confederates attempted to dynamite the tower causing no damage. They damaged the lens and lantern however, enough to require extensive repairs. Lighthouse technicians removed the lens to the Staten Island Lighthouse Depot, and temporarily replaced it with a 3rd order lens in 1863. It was not until 1868 that they restored the Cape Lookout Lighthouse to full capacity with the reconditioned original lens.
After the second battle at Fort Fisher in January 1865, the Southern Outer Banks fell into Union hands. The area's approaches to Wilmington and its importance as the primary state port had caused better defenses to be prepared than elsewhere along coastal North Carolina. So the southern coast was left alone until late in the war when Union forces were confident of a successful campaign. Confederate forces still managed to damage or destroy the lighthouses and beacons before retreating, including the lighthouse at Bald Head Island.
Within four years Confederate forces had diminished or destroyed every beacon or lighthouse in North Carolina. North Carolina's people had aggravated Congress for years about lighting the coast and North Carolina's people had darkened it. The Civil War ended for North Carolina when General Johnston commanding North Carolina State troops, surrendered unconditionally to General Sherman on April 26, 1865 in Raleigh.
After the war the Light House Board resumed improvement of the lighthouse service with a passion undiminished by interruption. Now Congress had a new fiscal policy to produce the best lighthouses in the world. New lighthouses became engineering marvels of elegance and style.
North Carolina was an early beneficiary of the new policy. They gave first attention to Cape Hatteras. Congress authorized a completely new tower in the style of the Cape Lookout Tower in March 1867. Today's Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was first lit, after many frustrating delays, on September 17, 1870. They mined the old tower with explosives and blew a chunk out of the side, like felling a tree, to knock it down February 16, 1871.
The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest free standing brick lighthouse tower in the United States and probably the world. Standing an imposing two-hundred-eight feet above the surrounding sand, including a unique and distinctive pedestal base, it is the finest expression of the brick design used throughout the United States. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is a marvel to this day, and even more amazing after the move in 1999. Weighing more than four hundred tons, the National Park Service hired a chimney moving company to move the entire light station. They raised and pushed the entire tower over half a mile from its original site, away from the encroaching sea. The lighthouse stands safely situated to the sea much like it was when they built it.
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is a National Monument listed as an active aid to navigation. Fully operational, the Coast Guard maintains the light and the National Park Service keeps the tower, quarters and grounds open to the public. Reopened after the move for Memorial Day Weekend 2000, visitors may climb the two-hundred-sixty-nine steps to look out from the lower gallery. In 1871, the Lighthouse Board built the existing head keeper's quarters and the assistants' quarters in 1854. They ordered the day-mark paint scheme in 1873 with the distinctive white and black spiral markings.
In 1867, they had restored the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. A cast iron staircase replaced the original wooden staircase. They did not build staircase anchors into the wall during construction. It requires regular repairs from incidental damage caused by the few people who climb it for maintenance. Recently they needed three-thousand pounds of bricks to repair the inner wall. Difficult to climb with obstructed passages and cramped man-ways, the tower is not open to the public due to these design flaws. The lighthouse tower and one acre of land it stands on remain in the Coast Guard jurisdiction within the Cape Lookout National Seashore.
Some lighthouse service records were lost to fire and many significant lighthouse details perished. Local people believe fire set during the Confederate vandalism in 1862 had destroyed the wood staircase of the Cape Lookout Tower. Other records state that they replaced it because of the hazard of fire. Another account says that Confederate raiders attempted to dynamite the tower in 1865. A fire consuming the stairs was the only damage from the raid.
The same is true for the disposition of the old Cape Lookout Lighthouse Tower. Local legend has it that the tower was crumbling and in danger of collapsing anytime. Local workers prepared the tower to fall, leaving the keystone brick for the county's fastest runner to pull out. When the appointed day arrived, people had gathered to watch the spectacle. The date changes with every time they tell the story, depending on who is telling the story. He pulled out the last brick and the tower fell. The punch line of the story says that no one knows if the man who pulled out that last brick was the county's fastest runner. He stumbled, but he surely crawled faster than anyone had ever seen. Official lighthouse lists record the tower as still standing late into the 19th century, but not on early 20th century lists.
Bodie Island Light Station got a new tower that was first lit October 1, 1872. Bodie Island Lighthouse is virtually identical in appearance and overall dimensions to the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, without the staircase design flaw. The Cape Lookout Tower design was so efficient and so well fashioned that they copied it at other stations along the coast, creating a new complaint. They looked so much alike and the terrain was so similar that in daytime mariners could not tell them apart. In 1873, the Light House Board devised a system for distinguishing the towers in daytime. When they built the Bodie Island Tower, they painted it with parallel black and white bands and a black lantern. Yet another station identical in design was even then being considered to fill the dark reach between the Bodie Island Lighthouse and the southernmost Virginia lighthouse at Cape Henry.
Even when factual records do exist local legend can replace historic facts. Some locals have perpetrated and believed a myth that the workers hired to paint the Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras Lighthouses got drunk and mixed up the painting instructions. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is set to mark Diamond Shoals. They were supposed to paint it with the diamond scheme. They should have painted Cape Lookout Lighthouse with the barber pole stripes, or so the story goes.
In reality the Light House Board ordered them painted exactly the way they are on April 14, 1873. "(Cape Hatteras') Tower will be painted in spiral bands, alternately black and white." "Cape Lookout (Lighthouse) will be checkered, the checkers being painted alternately black and white." In day-mark aids to navigation, a square black and white checkered sign, oriented like a diamond, is posted to mark a dangerous obstacle to navigation within a marked navigable waterway. The two center black checkers line up with the obstruction and the two white checkers, one on each side, indicate safe passage to either side with no lateral significance. Apparently the Light House Board recognized local conditions when ordering the checker painting of Cape Lookout Lighthouse. The black checkers face north and south toward shallow waters and the white checkers face east and west toward deep ocean bays. On the south, the black checkers face toward the shallow Cape Lookout Shoals extending twenty-one miles from land. The black north checkers face toward the shallow waters surrounding the headlands and Back Sound. Onslow Bay is on the white west side with water depths exceeding fifty feet, three miles from shore. Raleigh's Bay is on the white east face with water depths of fifty feet, four miles from shore.
It was only after painting the Cape Lookout Lighthouse that people realized the checker pattern looked like diamonds. Local people noticed, for years some fishermen called the Cape Lookout Shoals - Diamond Shoals. A whaling village, settled in 1726 existed until early 1900 at the east end of nearby Shackleford Banks. The village got named Diamond City in 1888 by Joe Etheridge, North Carolina Superintendent of the US Lifesaving Service. Imagine the confusion if a vessel in distress radioed a Mayday from Cape Lookout Shoals giving their position as Diamond Shoals, eighty miles away. No official of the lighthouse service has ever publicly considered changing the paint schemes. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse might look okay with the checkers but the Cape Lookout Lighthouse is too short to carry the spirals as gracefully as Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
The same year they painted the towers, 1873, they built new assistants keepers quarters at Cape Lookout Lighthouse, costing $5,000. Also, Congress authorized a light station for Currituck Beach. First lit December 1, 1875, the Currituck Beach Tower stands one-hundred-sixty-two feet tall to the roof of the black lantern. Built in the Cape Lookout Lighthouse - round brick tower style, the lighthouse was intentionally left unpainted to distinguish it from its neighbors. Outfitted with a polygonal 1st order lens the light was then visible nineteen miles. This tower still has the original optic in operation, the only 1st order lens still operational in a North Carolina lighthouse. The Coast Guard electrically automated Currituck Beach Lighthouse by 1939. Currituck Beach Lighthouse is visible twenty-one miles.
Currituck Beach Lighthouse is the only actual lighthouse in North Carolina. The tower is attached to the repair room, part of and above a "house." All the other North Carolina coastal lights are for all practical purposes light towers. A light tower stands alone with the other buildings separate from the tower. The Light House Board designated all manned navigation aids as light stations to simplify record keeping. Light station applies to light ships, light towers and lighthouses. To avoid public confusion, official custom allowed the continuing practice of calling all fixed and manned light stations - lighthouses.
In the beginning of 1876, the Centennial Year of the United States, twenty-five years after the Light House board began, the treacherous North Carolina coast was well and truly lit. For the first time, other nations recognized the US Lighthouse Service as the best in the world.
Whale oil was the primary fuel for American lighthouse lamps until 1885. Declining whale populations and increasing demand had driven the price of a gallon of whale oil up to $2.55. In the 1840's the price was only fifty-five cents a gallon. Rising fuel expense forced the Light House Board to adopt mineral oil as a supplemental fuel, now called kerosene. The Cape Lookout lamps burned alternately whale oil and kerosene starting in 1885 until 1907. After 1907, only kerosene fueled the lamps.
They built the present surviving Cape Lookout Lighthouse head keepers quarters in 1907 for $4,479. Sold as surplus by the Coast Guard in the 1950's, the keeper's house was moved south to its present location at Barden's Landing. When the private condemnation lease expires, the National Park Service may restore the head keepers quarters near its original location. Erosion has undermined the original site.
The Lighthouse Service adopted a new lamp invention in 1907, installed at Cape Lookout in 1912. The Incandescent Oil Vapor lamp gained quick favor from lighthouse keepers. IOV lamps consumed half as much fuel as wick lamps, and were nearly three times as bright, adding three or four miles of visibility. Because the fuel burned cleanly in the new lamps, Keepers no longer had to toil long, hot, hours cleaning soot from the lens and lantern glass. Lower fuel consumption also meant fewer trips hand carrying kerosene up the steep stairways. Keepers had more spare time. Some keepers tinkered with the lamps damaging them in the process. These expensive repair costs annoyed the Bureau of Lighthouses and they restricted keepers from doing anything more than basic maintenance to the lamps.
IOV lamps burn pressurized kerosene on a mantle, like modern gasoline camp lanterns. Keepers filled the fuel reservoir with kerosene and closed the lid with an airtight seal. The keeper then pumped air into the reservoir a specific number of strokes. They poured into the open air primer chamber and lighted a measured portion of alcohol. They needed this technique especially in winter when cold temperatures required priming the vaporizer chamber so the kerosene would burn. The heat from the burning alcohol warmed the vaporizer chamber. The kerosene valve was opened and the fuel sprayed on the heated metal sides vaporized. Once lit the burning lamp kept the vaporizer chamber hot. Already mixed with air in the reservoir the fuel traveled to the mantle and burned cleanly like a glowing ball.
Though Congress was well satisfied with the progress made by the Light House Board, more changes fine-tuned operations of the lighthouse service. A change in perception of the purpose of lighthouses moved the lighthouse administration from the Treasury to Commerce in 1903. Complaints over the military style of the lighthouse service led Congress to abolish the Light House Board in 1910. The Bureau of Lighthouses replaced it on June 17, 1910. They appointed George Putnam to head the Bureau of Lighthouses. One man instead of seven in charge improved efficiency. Perhaps the brief time the Light House Board had been under Commerce the bureaucrats had chafed at the military style management. George Putnam reorganized the new Bureau of Lighthouses in the civil service style. Putnam remained in charge of the Bureau for twenty-five years.
They moored Light Ship number Eighty fourteen miles out, on Lookout Shoals in 1904 for $90,000. Slipping from its mooring during a hurricane in 1933, the ship drove up on the shore. Before it was towed away for repairs and reassignment, they removed and installed the generator and lighting equipment in the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. The Lighthouse Service in 1900 had adopted electricity but Cape Lookout Lighthouse was one of the last, older towers converted. Candle power of the light increased from seventy-seven thousand to one-hundred-sixty-thousand. In 1914 they converted it to a revolving light with two ten-second occultations per minute. An occultation or eclipse was the period of darkness.
War again brought military importance to the lighthouse establishment in the two World Wars. During the first World War German submarines found easy prey along North Carolina's coast. "Brown outs" were tried at the lights to prevent aiding the submarines. However, the German Command recalled the submarines for duty closer to home without any decisive effect.
The second World War was different. German tactics recalled the earlier successfulness of the submarines. Wolf packs plied the North Carolina coast in 1942, taking a heavy toll. Eighty ships were sunk between January and April 1942. They extinguished none of the offshore lighted buoys, nor were any of the lighthouses blacked out until after June 1942. German submarines took advantage of the relaxed posture of coastal preparedness in what German sub commanders called the Atlantic Turkey Shoot. Adoption of British convoy tactics late in 1942, reduced torpedoing of merchant ships nearly to zero. The bight formed by Cape Lookout was the southern anchorage for convoy formation. Submarine nets stretched across the opening to deter torpedo attacks. Daylight was the safest time to run the gauntlet north to the next layover in the Chesapeake Bay. The convoys continued this "Bucket Brigade" style north along the coast in daylight runs. Off Newfoundland, they turned east disappearing into the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
By 1924, the US Lighthouse Service was the largest in the world operating over eleven-thousand navigation aids. During George Putnam's tenure the number had increased to twenty-two-thousand. The Bureau of Lighthouses continued four more years after Putnam retired in 1935.
January 28, 1915, Congress combined the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life Saving Service to form the Coast Guard. Congress organized the Coast Guard as a branch of the military forces. In peacetime, the Coast Guard is in the Treasury Department. It is part of the Navy during war. On July 1, 1939, the lighthouse service was incorporated into the Coast Guard, to its original jurisdiction under the Treasury Department. The Coast Guard is one of the oldest agencies of the U. S. Government owing part of its origins to the lighthouse service from 1789. After an underwater electric cable ran from Harkers Island to South Core Banks for the Lighthouse, The Coast Guard automated the Cape Lookout Lighthouse in 1950.
On June 3, 1965, Congress heard a bill to provide for the establishment of Cape Lookout National Seashore, authorizing purchase the following year 1966. Cape Lookout National Seashore opened as part of the Bicentennial celebration on July 4, 1976. In 1972, the Coast Guard removed the 1st order lens from the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. A 1st order lens weighs six and a-half tons, stands nearly twelve feet tall, and is six feet in diameter. The lens was on display for twenty-two years at the Coast Guard Support Center, in Portsmouth, Virginia. In August 1994, claiming operational expediency the Coast Guard installed the Cape Lookout lens in the Block Island South East Lighthouse in Rhode Island. Two years after they transferred the Lighthouse to the Southeast Lighthouse Foundation of New Shoreham, Rhode Island. The transfer was recorded effective July 27, 1992. The Block Island Light is today one of twelve active U. S. lighthouses with a 1st order lens. Block Island Lighthouse has its original green 1st order lens on display in the museum and hopes eventually to restore it to the tower. It would then be the only operational green 1st order lens in the country. Southeast Lighthouse Foundation reports ongoing negotiations to return the Cape Lookout lens to North Carolina.
Lighthouses that displayed the light all around the horizon, three-hundred-sixty degrees, needed eight lens panels. Each panel has a bull's-eye and concentric rings of prisms that focused and intensified the light. Cape Lookout Lighthouse has always displayed a three-hundred-sixty degree light. All eight original panels survive but two panels do not retain the maker's mark. About 1850 L. Sautter and Company manufactured the lens in Paris, France. Damaged by Confederate vandals during the Civil War, lighthouse technicians repaired the lens in 1868. The two panels that do not have the maker's mark may have had the marked parts replaced with unmarked parts from other lenses. Repairs often required the use of replacement parts cannibalized from other lenses. Remarkable because designing interchangeable parts did not become a widespread industrial practice until early in the 20th century. Further modernization at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse has reduced the maintenance requirements of the station. No longer requiring immediate attention, the Coast Guard deactivated the Cape Lookout Lifesaving Sation in 1982, established 1887. The Coast Guard then transferred the Coast Guard buildings and property to the Cape Lookout National Seashore. The National Register of Historic Places lists the 1917 era Coast Guard Buildings. They are Georgian Revival architectural style.
In 1972, the Coast Guard installed two, DCB-24 drums to replace the Fresnel system. A DCB-24 is a self contained (Drum Contained Beacon?) Quartz halogen lamp, reflector, and lens system. Each twenty-four-inch diameter drum has two filaments, one filament active at a time. When the active filament burns out, the drum rotates automatically and engages the electric contacts of the second filament, changing itself. Reportedly, the drum needs replacement only about once a year. Today, the light is on continuously but appears at a distance to flash once every fifteen seconds. The flashing comes from the mechanism turning the light at two revolutions per minute. Private airplane pilots have claimed the light is visible as far as forty miles compared with visibility from a vessel as far as twenty-five miles away.
A computerized system monitors the operation of the lighthouse. When they interrupt electric power on the mainland, the computer system energizes the backup generator providing uninterrupted service. Hurricane Bonnie struck here in September 1998 damaging the lightning protection. Subsequently a lightning strike damaged the computerized system. Repairs in 1999 to the lightning protection and replacement of the shorted electrical components have restored the tower to full operation. For over a year, boaters called the Coast Guard and the National Park Service headquarters repeatedly with reports of the light being out every time the power supply was interrupted.
Locals believe the inlet separating the lighthouse from Shackleford Banks to have opened from the 1933 hurricane season. Before 1933, a person could cross between the islands on a low tide. First dredged in 1938 to allow boat traffic, they named the inlet after the project's financier and organizer, Mr. Barden of New Bern. Maps from 1947 show five-hundred feet of land west of the lighthouse. Concern is increasing as further erosion claims more of the land.
In the 1999 hurricane season, storm waves exposed a corner of the coal shed foundation. Experts have given much of the blame for the erosion to dredge projects keeping Barden's Inlet open. New plans changing the channel route may slow erosion of the shore line, but currently no immediate danger exists to the lighthouse or any of the station buildings.
Local and visitors alike have long wondered why they call this area "Down East." Fishermen taking advantage of local prevailing winds, northeasters in winter and southwesters the rest of the year, sailed down east. Ninety percent of the annual local winds are from these two directions. A fishing boat leaving the harbor sails down east to its favorite fishing grounds and back west to home. The sails are set on one side sailing out and on the other side sailing in. No adjustment was necessary once the sails were set. Winds are usually just right for a broad reach or maybe, a close-reach in both directions, without any tacking back and forth, the entire round trip.
Down East is properly the fishing community of East Carteret County. The farther west in North Carolina, the larger Down East gets. The farther east, the smaller Down East is, ending at Cedar Island. From as far west as Raleigh, people have honestly assumed the name for all of central North Carolina's coastal plains when they were going down and east toward the coast. Cape Lookout Lighthouse, a solitary sentinel, quietly watches the coast. Providing peace of mind to countless sailors aboard many vessels. Remote from the mainland, access is more difficult than most lighthouses. Yet millions of lighthouse lovers have visited the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. The Cape Lookout Lighthouse will remain a treasured monument close in the hearts and minds of people from allover.
169 feet tall, from the ground to the top of the lightning rod
above the ball ventilator.
161 feet to the top of the roof.
150 feet to the focal plane of the light.
156 feet above mean low water to the light.
28 feet 7 inches base diameter.
9 feet wall thickness at the base.
1 foot 7 inches wall thickness at top of tower.
201 steps.
Inner tower wall is cylindrical, outer wall is tapered, the two walls are connected with a webbing of buttress walls that lock the two walls together. The total weight is more than 300 tons. The backup generator is in the tower on the ground level below the entrance of the tower.
Holland, Francis Ross Jr. America's Lighthouses. New York: Dover
Publications, 1972
Stick, David. North Carolina Lighthouses.Raleigh: North Carolina
Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History,
1980
Roberts, Bruce and Ray Jones. Southern Lighthouses. Old Saybrook,
Conn.: The Globe Pequot Press, 1989
Corey, Cindy. Exploring the Lighthouses of North Carolina. Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: The Provincial Press, 1982
Cheatham, James T. The Atlantic Turkey Shoot. Greenville, North
Carolina: Williams & Simpson Inc., 1990
O'Neill, Merlin. Vice Admiral, Commandant, US Coast Guard. Coast
Guard, United States. Volume 7, The Encyclopedia Americana. New York:
Americana Corporation, 1953. Pg 169
Lighthouse. Volume 17 The Encyclopedia Americana. 1953. pgs.
392-395.
www.noaa.gov
www.ndbc.noaa.gov
Also, try, Cape Lookout National Seashore, Cape Lookout Lifesaving
Station, National Register of Historic Places, Lighthouses, Library
of Congress.
This booklet is a compilation from sources listed in the bibliography, local libraries, the internet, local sources and Cape Lookout National Seashore publications. Advance copies were printed, and hand bound by the author, using a Canon BJC 5100 printer on 20# bond generic paper. The type face is Times New Roman 10 and 14 point from Corel Draw 9 Word Perfect. Cover picture, map and other artwork were designed by the author using Corel Photo Paint.
A native of the shore, international cosmopolitan, and Maritime Naturalist, John is the son of a career Navy officer. He retired from Colonial Williamsburg in 1992. He moved to Bettie in 1994 from Virginia. John began guiding walking tours on Shackleford Banks in the Cape Lookout National Seashore, on Thanksgiving 1994. Since April 1999, he has been giving interpretive 4-wheel drive, off road tours around and about Cape Lookout. Originating at Sand Dollar Ferry on Harkers Island, John is currently the main guide for Cape Lookout Tours. The booklet is sold with color map at the Barbour's Harbor Marina, also on Harkers Island.