Polishing the Pearl of the Chesapeake
Donations, Grants And Volunteers Restore Lighthouse

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 21, 2007

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.

"What we want to do is restore it to its turn-of-the-century -- turn of the past century, 1900 -- look," Gonzalez said.

A tour of the lighthouse recently showed that the lighthouse still has far to go. The small kitchen, sitting room and bedroom on its lower level are bare walls and floors, filled with construction supplies and equipment.

Some of the most notable upgrades have been new windows and doors donated by Jeld-Wen, a window and door company in Klamath Falls, Ore., that selected the Thomas Point house as one of two lighthouses to help restore. The doors are designed to look like wood, but they are molded fiberglass, to withstand the weather better.

"You want something that looks like it was," said Sherri Marsh Johns, an architectural historian who volunteers for the Lighthouse Society. "But we're in a harsh environment."

The restoration will be done in part by volunteer labor, Gonzalez said, and in part by contractors paid with grants and private donations. It's expected to cost $500,000, and the interiors will be completed in 2009.

In the meantime, the Annapolis Maritime Museum is hoping to begin running tours out to the lighthouse in July. These tours are planned to begin at the museum, at 723 Second St. in the Eastport neighborhood of Annapolis, and include a one-hour guided tour and a 30-minute boat ride to the lighthouse and back.

Jeff Holland, the museum's director, said the tours would be run only three times a day on weekends from July to October. More information about the tours, he said, is available at http://www.chesapeakelights.com.

"To be on-site where that structure has been since 1875 is a thrill," Holland said. He called the lighthouse "the iconic image of the Chesapeake Bay. . . . It just says: 'This is the bay. You're here.' "

The same kind of thrill came over Gonzalez, when his tour of the lighthouse reached the "lantern gallery," a small perch outside the tower that houses the now-electric light. The light, now run off solar panels, is still operated by the Coast Guard.

The view from Gonzalez's perch included the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the north and Tilghman Island to the south, with cargo ships and sailboats in between.

"I feel it right now. I mean, just standing here, I can transport myself to feel like a keeper did in the 1890s," he said. "It's that sense of awe, sense of responsibility, that you feel: 'Hey, I'm out here taking care of the people on the bay.' "