North Carolina Lighthouses

The four represent the pinnacle of nineteenth century technology. Built within a twenty year time span -- three of them were constructed within five years of each other -- they are the culmination of a two hundred year struggle to make the Tar Heel coast safer for the thousands of passing ships that dared travel the treacherous Graveyard of the Atlantic.

The nature of the North Carolina coast presented problems to the area's early sailors and settlers. The mysterious coast, stretching for more than three hundred miles, was a maze of inlets, shoals and channels that had to be negotiated to reach Colonial ports. The earliest captains relied on local pilots to guide them through tricky passages, but as the level of commerce grew, so did the calls for a more standardized system of navigational aids.

By the early 1700s, buoys and channel markers were placed along the state's busier waterways, but rudimentary navigational aids left much to be desired, often driven out of position by strong currents and tides. Merchants and mariners clamored for more substantial and reliable markers to guide their ships to safety.

Following the American Revolution, North Carolina officials finally moved to construct lighthouses at the mouth of the Cape Fear River and at Ocracoke Inlet, the state's two principal ports. Duties based on tonnage were collected from merchant ships to raise money for the project, land was secured at both locations, and work was begun on a lighthouse at the mouth of the Cape Fear on Smith Island.

As state officials worked to improve the safety of the coast, federal authorities were also turning their attention to coastal safety. In 1789, in one of its first pieces of business, Congress passed an act shifting the responsibility for coastline safety away from the thirteen states and into federal hands. Freed from having to allocate scarce resources to fund expensive capital projects such as lighthouses, the move met little opposition from state legislators.

A little more than two years later, in 1792, Congress appropriated the funding necessary to complete the lighthouse at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. A set of small, sandy dunes located on the west side of the island near the new lighthouse resembled the head of a bald man. The nickname for the location -- Bald Head -- was tagged to the lighthouse when it was completed in 1795 and it has endured, passed on to the first light's successors, for more than two hundred years.

With construction underway on Bald Head light, attention focused on Ocracoke Inlet. Although state officials had secured property on Ocracoke Island, federal planners opted for a lighthouse in the middle of the inlet's maze of shifting channels and sandbars on a substantial pile of oyster shells known locally as Shell Castle Island. Completed in 1798, the Shell Castle light joined Bald Head as the state's first lighthouses.