A 'Castle' of Their Own

They told the kids, Molly, 23, Sam, 19, and Caitlin, 15, who said, "Wow."

Dave wired the final payment early this month, and the couple, both 54, left a few days later for the airport in La Crosse, Wis. "It's the most exciting thing I've done in my life," he said of the purchase.

Now here they were, decked out in orange-and-black Coast Guard survival suits, surging across the sparkling Chesapeake to see their lighthouse for the first time.

They weren't sure what they'd find but hoped, by fall, to turn it into a family retreat.

They had left the Coast Guard station at Milford Haven in Mathews County, Va., squired by Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Richard W. Condit for the 90-minute run to Smith Point. The Coast Guard will own and maintain the light and foghorn atop the lighthouse, which marks a historically treacherous shoal in the bay formed by the river's outflow.

But the rest of the structure, which was built in 1897 about three miles offshore, will be the McNallys' property.

Dave, who owns a lumberyard and runs a construction business, had brought a big black bag filled with work gloves, binoculars, measuring tape, three flashlights, a camera, a pencil and paper. "I'm ready," he said.

They motored past Gwynn's Island, then Stingray Point and Windmill Point. Tangier Island lay to the northeast, Taskmakers Creek to the northwest. They spotted the flash about an hour out, and it quickly gave way to the lighthouse, a two-story brick building 24 feet in diameter and painted white atop a cast-iron cylinder called a caisson.

Smith Point has been considered hazardous to mariners for centuries. Numerous groundings and sinkings have happened there, and the current commercial shipping channel veers dramatically east away from the spot, the Coast Guard said.

The caisson construction, in which a huge cylinder was sunk into the bottom of the bay and filled with concrete, replaced the old lighthouse, built on screw-tipped iron pilings. The old house was swept away by ice during a freeze in 1895, according to news accounts of the time.

The big freeze also led to a mysterious murder. According to one newspaper, the first assistant lighthouse keeper was apparently slain by his wife when he returned to his home after the destruction of the old lighthouse. In those days, keepers' absences from their homes could be long -- and not always lamented. "That old devil is home to stay," his wife reportedly told her lover before the crime.

The days of manned lighthouses are long gone. The Coast Guard maintains the navigational aides on about 300 lighthouses throughout the country, but Smith Point, like most others, is now automated.