Polishing the Pearl of the Chesapeake

ON THOMAS POINT SHOAL, CHESAPEAKE BAY -- From the shore, where its cottage-on-stilts silhouette stands out across a mile and a half of water, the Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse looks like a postcard-perfect image of the Chesapeake Bay.

Up close, though, it looks like a house no one has lived in for 21 years. A visit to the hexagonal structure, whose keepers departed in 1986, shows its paint is flaking, its metal undercarriage is corroded, and its interior is covered in white paint and plywood.

But now, the famous "screwpile" lighthouse, the last of that distinctive design still shining in its original spot, is being readied for its close-up again. Local volunteers and a company from 2,700 miles away are restoring the structure to how it looked a century ago. They plan to reopen the lighthouse for public tours this summer.

The aim, leaders of the renovation say, is to reintroduce the bay region to an icon most people have known only from a distance.

"It is the last of its kind out in the water," said Henry Gonzalez, a volunteer from the U.S. Lighthouse Society who is Thomas Point Shoal's lighthouse manager.

"It's one thing to see it ashore at a museum," he said. "It's a different thing to see it, you know, in its original location."

The lighthouse is offshore of Anne Arundel County's Bay Ridge neighborhood, east of downtown Annapolis. It was built in 1875 to warn ships away from dangerously shallow water off Thomas Point -- using an oil lamp.

Like more than 40 others around the Chesapeake, the house was built on "screwpiles," which are stiltlike iron support beams, screwed deeply into the mud. In this area, Gonzalez said, the style was preferred over the tower lighthouses seen elsewhere because it was easier to build on the bay's shallow, soft bottom.

Gonzalez said the house was manned first by the U.S. Lighthouse Service, which sent keepers out for three-week shifts, alternated with one week's rest. Thomas Point was a "stag lighthouse," he said. Male keepers only, no families. Although the house was well within sight of land, there were some scary times: In 1876, thick ice threatened to sweep the house away. About 1904, the isolation may have driven one assistant keeper out of his mind. Gonzalez said he found correspondence from the head keeper, asking for help.

The house was manned by the U.S. Coast Guard after 1939, then converted to run automatically in 1986. In the years after that, the light still shone and the foghorn still blew -- activated by a machine that senses fog. The place was mainly deserted, but it still fared better than other screwpile lighthouses. Three survive as museum attractions, but most of them had their cottages demolished, leaving only a tower.

Then, in 2000, the U.S. government began trying to give away lighthouses around the country to local governments and nonprofit groups. In 2004, the Thomas Point lighthouse was officially passed to the City of Annapolis, which leased the house to Gonzalez's group.

The house was in poor shape. Hurricane Isabel had washed out a lower platform close to the water, cutting off easy access to the cottage. But, once the platform was rebuilt, in 2005, volunteers from the Lighthouse Society began renovations aimed at re-creating the lighthouse's early years.