The Lost Lights

A new type of light was also incorporated to replace the aging lightships. The screw-pile lighthouse, which relied on sturdy iron pilings that could be threaded into the bottom of the sound like huge screws to form a foundation, began to appear along the Carolina coast. The screw-pile lights, which had been perfected by a blind British engineer two decades before, became immensely popular among American planners. An 1859 directive from the Lighthouse Board called for the substitution of the cheaper and more durable screw-pile lights to replace lightships.

By the end of the 1850s, North Carolina's navigation system was at its peak. Tall, coastal towers guided ocean-going ships, while smaller interior lighthouses, lightships, and screw-pile lights guided traffic along the sounds and rivers. But the dawn of the Civil War turned into the twilight of the early Tar Heel lights. The winds of war would soon unravel more than a half-century of effort as the lights became strategic objectives.

The Union naval blockade of the South forced Confederate planners to extinguish and often destroy the lighthouses they had lobbied so hard for in the halls of Congress. The lights did little to benefit the Southern cause and destroying them helped hinder Union commercial and military traffic. The effects on the beacons were devastating. Confederate forces destroyed the lighthouse at Bodie Island and on Bogue Banks, along with most of the lights along the Cape Fear River. They removed or vandalized the Fresnel lenses from Cape Hatteras to Cape Fear and damaged or destroyed all of the lightships. Although Union engineers were able to replace the lenses, the damage was done. Gone was a generation of lights and lightships. Soon to follow was the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was so badly damaged by a half-century of wind erosion to its foundation that a replacement was erected in 1870 and the original 1803 tower destroyed.

Today, there is little evidence of the first lighthouse that once marked the North Carolina coast. A shell of Price's Creek Lighthouse is all that is left of the extensive system of lights along the Cape Fear River, and a single screw-pile light near Edenton is all that remains of the interior beacons. But the remainder of the first lights are gone -- victims of erosion, warfare and advancements in technology. In their place are the second- or even third-generation of lights to identify the Tar Heel shoreline. The small bright beacons that now flash across the night sky are just a fraction of what once was, when early lighthouses and lightships marked miles of liquid highway along the North Carolina coast.