Three Aprils — two wars and a lighthouse falling into the sea

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

April 1777

The first of the three is the least remembered. During the Revolution, the cape and the mouth of the bay were contested water: British vessels operated in the Delaware, foraged along the shore, and harassed the small coastal settlements that could not defend themselves.

Lewes was exposed by its position. The same geography that made it a pilot town — sitting exactly where deep-water traffic must pass — put it within reach of any hostile squadron in the bay, in 1777 as in 1813 and, in a different form, in 1942.

April 1813

The second April is the famous one: the twenty-two-hour bombardment of 6 and 7 April 1813, when Commodore Beresford’s squadron shelled the town for refusing to supply it with cattle, and inflicted casualties amounting to one pig and one chicken. The full account is on our page Cannonballs over Lewes.

Both the 1777 and 1813 events share a pattern: a naval power with overwhelming firepower discovering that a shallow bay, a defended shore and a stubborn militia are more trouble than a coastal town is worth.

April 1926: the sea takes the lighthouse

The third April had no enemy. The Cape Henlopen Lighthouse — built between 1767 and 1769, the sixth lighthouse raised on the Atlantic coast — had stood for more than a century and a half while the dune it was built behind slowly walked away from underneath it.

A storm in 1920 did severe damage; the light was abandoned in 1924; and in April 1926 the tower went over the edge and into the Atlantic, where its remains still lie. Our page on the Cape Henlopen Lighthouse follows the whole story, including the Philadelphia lottery that paid for it.

This is the calamity that actually mattered, because it was not an event but a process. Cape Henlopen is a moving landform. The Great Dune migrates, the point extends, the shoreline behind it erodes; the cape is one of the more restless stretches of the mid-Atlantic coast. The lighthouse fell because the ground it depended on had been leaving for a century.

Why grouping them is useful

Setting the three together makes a point Mrs. Brittingham clearly enjoyed: that a coastal town’s history is written by two kinds of force, and only one of them can be negotiated with. Lewes saw off two navies. It did not see off the sand.

The lesson is not merely antiquarian. The same processes are still running, faster now, and the same shoreline is still moving. The concrete towers of Fort Miles are being undermined on the same coast for the same reason the lighthouse was.

From the original page at this address

“Dates in April of 1777, 1813, and 1926 are remembered for noisy and calamitous happenings in the vicinity of Delaware’s Cape Henlopen — that sandy spit marking the trysting place of the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay. The first two events in the series were man-made while the most recent occurrence was under the command of Mother Nature.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “April Anniversaries of Coastal Calamities”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.