Archive record
- This address
- http://www.lewestown.com/lewes_history/lighthou.html
- Originally
- An article on the Cape Henlopen Lighthouse by Hazel D. Brittingham, Lewestown Publishers, 1997
- Original page
- Capture of 12 October 1999 at the Internet Archive · mirror at archive.today
The article below is newly written and independently sourced. It is not Mrs. Brittingham's text. Her original is at the archive links above.
The lighthouse that a sand dune destroyed
For 161 years a granite tower stood on the Great Dune at Cape Henlopen, marking the entrance to Delaware Bay. It survived the Revolution, a fire, and the end of its own usefulness — and then, at about 12:45 in the afternoon of 13 April 1926, on a clear spring day, the dune it stood on finished walking out from under it and the tower fell into the sea.
Why did Philadelphia pay for a Delaware lighthouse?
Because the shipwrecks were Philadelphia's. By the mid-eighteenth century the approaches to Delaware Bay — the only sea road to the busiest port in the colonies — were claiming ships and cargo regularly. Philadelphia merchants and mariners lobbied for a light at the bay's southern cape and raised the money through public lotteries. The land was given by Thomas and William Penn. U.S. Coast Guard records date the station's establishment to 1767, with the tower first lit in 1769; the Journal of the Lewes Historical Society notes the records conflict on whether construction finished in 1765 or 1767. It was among the first lighthouses built in the American colonies — commonly counted the sixth — and the reported cost was about £7,674.
Sussex County has no building stone, so ashlar granite was quarried near the Brandywine north of Wilmington, shipped down to the Lewes Creek dock, moved by shallow barge to within about two miles of the site, and hauled the rest of the way by ox teams. The finished tower stood 69 feet 3 inches tall, 26 feet across at the base with walls six feet thick, set on the north side of the Great Dune roughly 46 feet above the sea to gain height.
What happened to it in the Revolution?
In 1777 the lighthouse burned — tradition blames a British raiding party, and the story has been embroidered over two centuries — and it stood dark through the rest of the war. It was repaired and relit by 1784, with Abraham Hargis among its early keepers, and then simply did its work for another century and a half while Lewes made the dune a picnic ground. Easter Monday became a local holiday: the town climbed the Great Dune by the tower for egg rolls and races down the sand.
Why did it fall?
The dune was never still. By 1897 the Lighthouse Board reported the sand around the tower blowing away at three to five feet a year; in 1905 tons of brush were laid around the tower and oil house to slow the undermining. Nothing held. The light itself was made redundant by newer aids in the bay, and it was discontinued — illuminated for the last time on 30 September 1924, its lens removed. Schemes to save the tower were floated, including a jetty of obsolete World War I ships and a protective steel wall; none was built in time or at all.
The end came on 13 April 1926, and by chance it was witnessed in detail. In John W. Beach's account, a Western Union operator named Roland Webster was eating lunch on a nearby bridge as a high spring tide, pushed by a northeast breeze, worked at the base of the dune — until the last of the sand slid seaward and the tower followed it down at about 12:45 p.m. In the account Hazel Brittingham preserved in Lantern on Lewes, government officials had gathered that very day to assess saving the lighthouse, and were at lunch aboard ship when a lookout shouted that it was gone. Townspeople carted off the fallen granite for fireplaces and doorsteps; Lewes masonry still hides pieces of the tower, and more pieces are claimed than could ever have existed.
What remains today?
Nothing of the tower stands on the cape, which is now Cape Henlopen State Park. A second, smaller light — the Cape Henlopen Beacon of 1824, a 45-foot tower about a mile north — is also long gone. A 1924 replica ended up, after a 2004 move, in the traffic roundabout at the entrance to Rehoboth Beach, and the lighthouse survives as the logo of the Cape Henlopen School District and in a large photographic record: the Delaware Public Archives holds the iconic final photographs, the Hagley Museum holds a 1925 aerial survey taken the year after decommissioning, and the Lewes Historical Society's Brittingham Collections Center holds the photograph collection Hazel Brittingham herself assembled and donated.
Hazel Brittingham collected Cape Henlopen Lighthouse photographs for decades and donated them to the Lewes Historical Society; they are not reproduced here. See about Hazel Brittingham. The naming of the cape itself has its own tangled story, told at the name of Henlopen.
Where this comes from
- U.S. Coast Guard Historian's Office, Cape Henlopen Lighthouse — station established 1767, first lit 1769, deactivated 1924.
- Cape Gazette, “Cape Henlopen Lighthouse stands in 1926”, citing the Journal of the Lewes Historical Society, Vol. XVII — the 1765/1767 conflict, the £7,674 cost, the Brandywine granite and ox-team haul.
- Cape Gazette, “When Cape Lighthouse fell, stones were in high demand” — the fall, the salvaged stones, the rescue schemes, the photographic record.
- Wikipedia: Cape Henlopen Light — the Penn land gift, the 1777 burning and 1784 relighting, the 1897 erosion report, the 1905 brush work, the 1824 Beacon, the replica.
- John W. Beach, The Cape Henlopen Lighthouse — the Roland Webster eyewitness account, as quoted in Secrets of the Eastern Shore.
- Hazel D. Brittingham, Lantern on Lewes (Lewestown Publishers, 1998) — the account of the inspection party at lunch on the day of the fall.
- Historic Lewes, Lewes timeline — last illumination 30 September 1924; fall at about 12:45 p.m., 13 April 1926.