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Government sells off public lighthouse in auction Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/388767.htmlhttp://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/388767.html
Lighthouse lures couple east
Published: Jan 15, 2006 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 15, 2006 02:42 AM
Michael E. Ruane, The Washington Post
Behind them stretched the long, foamy "V" carved in the frigid water by the Coast Guard work boat, and the weekend drive from the Richmond airport, and the trip from Minnesota, and the three kids and the family business back home in Winona, a thousand miles away.
Ahead in the distance was Dave McNally's adventure, spotted on the horizon maybe eight miles off. "See the flash?" he said. "There! See it?"
There, indeed, was the tiny wink of the Smith Point Lighthouse at the mouth of the Potomac River.
McNally hurried out of the cabin to his wife, Teri, standing on the wind-blown deck. There it was: the squat, ramshackle, guano-stained, century-old brick octagonal tower with a crooked outdoor privy and 24-hour foghorn. Their lighthouse.
Not many people in Winona, Minn., probably knew this, but the McNallys had just bought a lighthouse in the Chesapeake Bay. They bought it even though neither one had seen it in person before, or been on the bay before, or been to Virginia before.
Actually, it was Dave who bought it.
He saw it in a federal online auction in October and picked it up for $170,000. Having grown up near the Mississippi River in Minnesota, he has been a boater for years and has always loved lighthouses. He had mentioned it to Teri: "I'm thinking about buying a lighthouse in the Chesapeake Bay."
"Oh, yeah," she thought. Dave got these crazy ideas. "Here goes another one."
But when he took her to dinner one night at the Hillside Fish House -- across the Mississippi River in Wisconsin -- and started spreading lighthouse pictures on the table, she thought, "Oh, my God, this guy's really serious about this."
It was ridiculous, she thought: "What do you do with a lighthouse?" Plus, they lived in Minnesota. Plus, this lighthouse was out in the water. "Where's the land?" she asked.
"There isn't any land," he said.
Then she realized: "Dave. You want to do this." Yeah, he said, he did.
They told the kids -- Molly, 23; Sam, 19; and Caitlin, 15, who said, "Wow."
Dave wired the final payment early in December, 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.
Ready to work
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.
Even so, as the McNallys watched their lighthouse loom closer, with its rusty caisson, or cast-iron cylindrical structure, and peeling white paint, Teri stood in the bow of the boat and said: "It looks like a floating castle."
But as the boat eased toward the two corroded metal ladders they would climb to reach the top of the caisson, something got her attention: the foghorn. Which grew louder as they approached and which went off every 15 seconds.
"That's not a bad sound," her husband said.
"Is that how often it goes off?" she asked.
"At least it's not a grating, aggravating sound," he said.
She looked momentarily perplexed.
They knew that there was a foghorn and that it ran 24 hours a day, fog or not. But this was the first time they had heard it. It wasn't a painful sound, exactly. It was like a hunting horn, only designed to be heard for miles.
Up the ladder
But now it was time to climb the ladders.
Dave hoisted his bag and asked whether it was OK to carry it up. Condit said it was but urged caution. "General rule when you guys are on there: Trust nothing," he called out. "No handrails. No ladder rungs. Even where you're stepping."
Anything might collapse.
"Am I first?" Dave said. He was. He started up. "It's easier than it looks," he called to his wife. She followed, uncertainly. After they reached the five-foot-wide walkway around the caisson's rim, Dave thrust both arms in the air, Rocky-style, and proclaimed: "We made it!"
Then they looked around.
There were vacant rooms, collapsed ceiling boards, graffiti. "(Expletive) this light," someone had carved near the steps to the second floor. A crowbar hung over a banister. An empty beer can sat on a shelf. In the attic, Condit retrieved a tattered keepers' log from October 1965. The basement, down in the caisson, smelled of diesel fuel.
Outside, the iron outhouse, which hung over the water, was stained white with bird droppings. It had two portholes and no door.
But there were touches of faded elegance in the woodwork and brickwork, and out every window glittered the bay.
"It's not as bad as I thought," Dave said. He pulled out his measuring tape and gripped a pencil with his teeth. The kitchen, pantry and sitting room could be on the first level, two bedrooms on the second. You'd need a boat and a place to moor it.
It would cost money, maybe $75,000, Dave thought. And it would take time.
Teri got out her video camera. The Minnesotans had a lot of work to do. Inside, the foghorn didn't sound quite so loud.
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