Some landmarks keep you far away. This one you can walk right into.
Out at the edge of Colonial Park there stands a squat little building on stilts — white clapboard, a red roof, a lantern room perched on top. It looks like a cottage that wandered out onto the water and decided to stay. That’s the 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse, and it is the last of its kind in all of North Carolina.
This Saturday, August 8, is National Lighthouse Day, so I want to tell the story of how this one survived when so many others didn’t. Because the Roanoke River Lighthouse very nearly wasn’t here at all.
The Graveyard of the Atlantic
To understand why the lighthouse was built, you have to understand the water.
The coast beyond Edenton has a grim old nickname: the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Shipwrecks litter the channel islands of the Outer Banks, most claimed by shoals and storms, a few, legend has it, by the pirate Blackbeard himself. And yet the ships kept coming, because the river systems around the Albemarle were too rich to resist. For generations these waters were crowded with vessels carrying commerce across the region, and much of Edenton’s early wealth came right off those decks.
All that water traffic needed help for navigation. Earlier lighthouses had tried to mark the way and been destroyed — crushed by ice floes and battered apart by the elements. So, in 1886, a new one was built to do the job for good, one designed to stand up to hurricanes, ice, and everything else the sound could throw at it. It began guiding ships at the mouth of the Roanoke River near Plymouth in 1887.
A Lighthouse Screwed to the Riverbed
Here’s what makes it rare.
The Roanoke River Lighthouse is a screw-pile lighthouse, so named because its iron pilings were literally screwed down into the soft riverbed to hold the whole structure fast against wind and current. It’s a clever piece of engineering, and once these lights dotted the shallow sounds of the Eastern Seaboard. Today, this is the only screw-pile lighthouse left in North Carolina — and one of only a handful anywhere in the country.
For more than fifty years it did exactly what it was built to do, standing watch over the sound from 1887 until 1941, when it was finally decommissioned.
From Beacon to Backyard
This is where the story takes a turn you probably don’t expect.
After the lighthouse was retired, a waterman and former Lighthouse Service employee named Elijah Tate bought it from the Coast Guard — along with two other identical lighthouses — for just few dollars each. Then came the hard part: getting them home. Moving a lighthouse across open water, it turned out, was easier said than done, and the first two slid off the barge and were lost below the water, to damaged to be saved.
Only the third survived the journey to Edenton. Hauled up onto land, it became a house. For decades, one of the strangest and most charming homes in town was a retired lighthouse, lived in as an ordinary residence right up until the 1990s.
The Storm and the Rescue
Then came 2003, and Hurricane Isabel.
Edenton usually gets a pass from the worst storms — the geography of the region tends to steer them elsewhere. Isabel didn’t cooperate. It hit head-on, the worst storm to strike the area in decades, tearing apart homes and battering historic buildings across the community. Among the casualties was the old Roanoke River Lighthouse, left damaged and empty.
But it was the last screw-pile lighthouse in the state, and we’re not a town that lets that kind of thing slip away. People leaped into action. In 2007, the Edenton Historical Commission purchased the lighthouse for $225,000 and spent more than $75,000 to move, repair, and restore it. A sweeping fundraising drive brought individuals, neighbors, and the whole town together to save it, and the state stepped in to help.
In 2012, the restored lighthouse made its final journey from the land back out to the water, to a permanent home at Colonial Park on Edenton Bay. It has stood there ever since, a museum, a landmark, and one of the most photographed spots in town.
Why It Still Matters
There’s a reason this little building means so much here.
Its first home wasn’t Edenton at all — but it’s been part of this town so long now that it’s impossible to picture the bay without it. More than that, the lighthouse has come to stand for something about this community itself. When something arrives here, whether a person or a building, Edenton doesn’t let it go easily. We take care of it. We cherish it. We restore it when it needs restoring, and we do whatever it takes to pass it on to the next generation.
Walk out to Colonial Park on any given afternoon, and you’ll see kids racing up to the railings, peering out over the water for pirates that aren’t there and sailboats that likely are. Most of them have no idea they’re playing beside a national treasure — the last of its kind, its two lost cousins still resting somewhere at the bottom of the sound. But it is a treasure. And it stands today only because generations of Edentonians gave their time, their effort, and their dollars to keep it standing.
Come See It This Weekend
There’s no better time to visit than National Lighthouse Day.
The Roanoke River Lighthouse sits at 7 Dock Street, right at Colonial Park on the Edenton waterfront, and it’s open for guided tours through the Historic Edenton State Historic Site. All-Sites Tours run at 10 a.m., 12 p.m., and 2 p.m., and individual site tours are available from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are a bargain: $2.50 per adult and $1.50 per child for a single site, or $5.00 for adults to tour the Lighthouse, Courthouse, and Iredell House all together. To arrange a tour, group visit, or event, call the Historic Edenton State Historic Site at 252-482-2637 or email edenton@ncdcr.gov.
So this Saturday, come stand at the railings yourself. Look out over the water, imagine the ships that once needed this light to find their way home, and take in the last screw-pile lighthouse in North Carolina — saved, restored, and shining on, because a small town by the water decided it was worth keeping.
It survived hurricanes, ice, war, and neglect to get here. The least we can do is come say hello.
