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Maritime monuments
By KAREN M. LASKI
© St. Petersburg Times,
Located on remote sites, lighthouses are an important and often romanticized part of the American landscape. Long since abandoned by their keepers, these lonely silhouettes of a bygone era are monuments to maritime history. About 2,000 lighthouses were built along the nation's coastline. When the lighthouse era peaked in 1914, 1,450 keepers were manning 850 stations. Chesapeake Bay's treacherous shoals and meandering channels provided a special set of challenges for mariners. Maryland built 44 lighthouses along its 4,000-mile, convoluted shoreline. Between Havre de Grace at the head of the bay and Point Lookout at the southern tip of St. Mary's County, 25 lighthouses, built between 1822 and 1920, remain. Visitors can tour four of these landmarks at their original settings; three others were relocated to museums and restored. More than half of the bay's remaining lighthouses are owned by the military. These are not open to the public, with the exception of Point Lookout, which is open on the first Saturday in November. Maryland's lighthouses were constructed from various building materials, which resulted in a variety of styles and sizes, heights and wall thicknesses. Starting at the bay's headwaters, you can visit two stone tower lights within a short distance of each other. Concord Point Lighthouse in Havre de Grace has guided ships in the Upper Chesapeake for more than 170 years, which makes it the oldest continuously operated lighthouse in Maryland. Farther east at Elk Neck State Park, Turkey Point stands on a bluff 130 feet above high tide. In addition to being the highest light on the bay, Turkey Point is known for having had a succession of female lightkeepers. Although it wasn't unusual for wives to serve as unpaid assistant keepers, the Lighthouse Board's official policy prohibited the appointment of women as keepers. For now-unknown reasons, the board appointed four female keepers at Turkey Point, and a like number at Piney Point in St. Mary's County. When Turkey Point's last keeper, Fanny May Salter, retired in 1947, she had served for 22 years. Far less durable than the stone towers at Concord and Turkey points were the dozens of hexagonal screwpile lighthouses, of which only four remain. These lighthouses were built atop cast iron piles that had a screwlike blade at their lower ends and literally were screwed into sandy or muddy bottoms. In October 1988, the Seven Foot Lighthouse, which once stood at the mouth of the Patapsco River, found a new home at Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Here visitors can glimpse lighthouse family life, lived in an incredibly small space with only family members for company. The first-floor living quarters measure 51 feet in diameter and were once home to a family of 12. (Rainy days must have been a challenge.) A much smaller second floor housed the oil tanks. There was a fueling mechanism for the light on the third floor. Life was somewhat easier on the lightship Chesapeake, now anchored next to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Once positioned 14 miles off Virginia Beach, it serves as a floating classroom for the Inner Harbor's Baltimore Maritime Museum. Five officers, 11 seamen and a cook lived aboard this 130-ton vessel for a year at a time. Life on board was often monotonous, repetitious and uncomfortable, especially on the early 19th century lightships. Barrel-shaped bottoms kept them in constant motion during rough weather, sometimes heaving mattresses from bunks. Virtually all the bay's lightships destroyed during the Civil War were replaced by screwpile lighthouses, some of which did not fare any better. When a massive ice floe destroyed the first Hooper Strait screwpile, keeper John S. Cornwell and assistant Alexander S. Conway escaped in a small open boat and spent the next 24 hours on the ice. Cornwell later apologized for not submitting his fourth quarter report on time and explained: "When the house went down, the papers went with it." Hooper Strait II almost met a similar fate when the Coast Guard decreed the removal (burning) of all screwpiles. Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum personnel acquired the 42-ton dwelling and had it barged 40 miles up the Chesapeake to its new home in St. Michael's, where the beautifully restored clapboard lighthouse is open for inspection. Except for the strange-looking roof decoration, Point Lookout resembles an ordinary house -- a house with a past. The first keeper died two months after assuming his post. The third keeper caused so much damage that his annual wages for 1849 were withheld. A total of 3,384 Confederate soldiers died here when it was a makeshift federal prison. Haunted? You bet. So many made this claim that Point Lookout is the only Maryland lighthouse investigated by a team of paranormal psychologists. The 35-foot conical tower at Piney Point is the oldest of 11 lighthouses erected on the Potomac River. Seeking relief from the capital's hot humid weather, Presidents James Madison, Franklin Pierce and Teddy Roosevelt summered on this spit of land. Sixteen thousand people have visited the Lighthouse of Presidents since it opened three years ago. One unusual exhibit on display in the small museum occupying the former keeper's quarters is the saga of German submarine U-1105. Nicknamed the Black Panther because of its black rubber coating, the boat lies submerged a mile west of Piney Point after being sunk by the U.S. Navy in 1949. Now head north to see the only screwpile still on its original site, Thomas Point Shoal, 4 miles south of Annapolis. It was the last manned screwpile lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay when it was automated in 1986. A 90-minute cruise aboard the Rebecca takes you within camera range of this historic landmark, but you'll need a long lens for a close-up shot. FOR MORE INFORMATION:Resources include: Maryland Lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay: An Illustrated History by F. Ross Holland. Bay Beacons: Lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay by Linda Turbyville. Contact the Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development, 217 E Redwood St., Baltimore, MD 21201; call (410) 767-6298. Also, contact the U.S. Lighthouse Society, 244 Kearny St., Fifth Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108; call (415) 362-7255. -- Karen M. Laski is a freelance writer who lives in Marshall, Va.
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