We recently took a boat tour of South Carolina's Winyah Bay. The tour included a
visit to North Island and its Georgetown Lighthouse. I was so impressed with
the history of the place that I decided to paint a picture of the lighthouse for
my local landmark series.
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| Georgetown Lighthouse 12"x9" oil |
Her's my
rendition of the Georgetown Lighthouse.
and here's a
photo from the University of North Carolina of the the lighthouse.
By way of
background....Georgetown Harbor, located in Wynyah Bay between North and South
Islands, is the second largest seaport in South Carolina. Safe passage into the
harbor is now, and as it always has been, critical to the local economy. In
1789, Revolutionary War Patriot Paul Trapier donated a tract of land on North
Island for the establishment of the Georgetown Lighthouse. (aka North Island
Lighthouse.) The seventy-two-foot, pyramidal tower, constructed of Cypress
wood, was finished in the early part of 1801 Besides the tower, a two-story
keeper’s dwelling was built along with a tank for holding the whale oil that
fueled the lighthouse’s lamp. The wooden tower’s life was cut short by a violent
storm in 1806.
Several years passed before a replacement structure was
built. A marble plaque positioned above the door records the names of those who
undertook the work on the tower and records the year of its erection as 1811.
This time the seventy-two-foot tower was constructed of brick, greatly reducing
the chance that those big, bad gales which plague the area (aka hurricanes)
would blow the lighthouse down. The staircase
that spirals upwards inside the stout brick tower is made of stone. In 1857, the
tower was modified to display a fourth-order Fresnel lens.
When the Civil War broke out, the Confederates used the
Georgetown Lighthouse as a lookout station, until Union forces captured it in
May of 1862. The lighthouse was heavily damaged during the North-South conflict,
and as part of the post-war repair work, the tower was heightened to
eighty-seven feet. The Georgetown
Lighthouse was manned until 1986, when the Coast Guard automated the
light.
As stipulated in the will of former Boston Red Sox
owner Tom Yawkey, South Island
and all of North Island, save the lighthouse acreage, was bequeathed to the
South Carolina Heritage Trust, creating the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Preserve. In
2001, the lighthouse property was added to the preserve. This is a rare early federal lighthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places,
and with it now under state control, the tower will hopefully be restored and
one day open to the public. The 1-story brick keeper's house, brick oilhouse
(1890), and boathouse (1894) are also preserved
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