You can't quite see it from the Maryland end, but down at the south tip of this island, over on the Virginia side, stands one of the prettiest lighthouses on the whole coast — and behind it is a story of a country that would not quit on a job, even with a war in the way.
For a long time, sailors along here had almost nothing to guide them past these deadly shoals — an early little lighthouse was so short and dim it was near useless, and ships kept dying in the dark. So the government committed to a proper tower. They started building it around eighteen sixty — and then the Civil War broke out and stopped everything cold. The half-finished stump of a lighthouse just sat there through the war years while men fought and the shoals kept collecting wrecks.
When the war ended, they went right back to it, and on the first of October, eighteen sixty-seven, they lit the Assateague Lighthouse at last — a hundred and forty-two feet of brick, painted in bold red-and-white bands so you couldn't mistake it by day, throwing a beam far out to sea by night. Three keeper families lived at its foot, tending the light in all weathers, and a life-saving crew set up alongside them. Between the tall light and the brave surfmen, this graveyard of a coast finally started giving sailors a fighting chance.
It's still standing down there, still striped like a peppermint, and you can climb it if you make your way around to the Virginia side someday. A tall, cheerful tower with a long, patient story — built through a war, to answer a coastline that had taken far too many ships.
Photo: Acroterion · CC BY-SA 4.0
