If you look for the Cape Henlopen Lighthouse you will not find it, because it is in the ocean. It stood here for more than a century and a half and then, on April 13, 1926, the sand it was built on finished moving out from under it.
The one that fell, in February 1920The Cape Henlopen Light on its dune, photographed by the U.S. Bureau of Lighthouses from about 500 feet north of the tower. The note on the print says the brush on the dune had recently been placed. The tower fell six years later.U.S. Bureau of Lighthouses photograph, National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain; cropped from the album page.
What was here
Philadelphia merchants and ship owners started a lottery in 1761 to pay for a light at the mouth of Delaware Bay. Their cargo had to come past this cape to reach them, and too much of it was not arriving. The tower was finished in 1765.
| Height | 69 feet, whitewashed stone |
|---|---|
| Material | Wilmington granite |
| Where it stood | On a 46-foot sand hill, about a quarter of a mile back from the shore |
| Base | 26 feet across, with walls 6 feet thick tapering to just over 3 feet at the top |
| Working life | Completed 1767, first lit 1769. The lens was removed in 1924. |
Read that again: a quarter of a mile back from the shore. That was the margin the builders thought was generous in the 1760s, and the sea ate all of it.
The cape moves
This is not a story about a badly built tower. It is a story about ground that will not stay still.
Sand carried up the coast piles onto Cape Henlopen and the spit has grown roughly a mile northward over the past 160 years. Land is being added at the tip and taken away on the ocean flank at the same time. The lighthouse was on the flank.
By 1924 the light was switched off. Two years later the tower went over.
What happened to the stone
Almost immediately, people took it.
Contemporary accounts describe a rush — one man half filled his car with rock from the tower, and others were reported carting off everything in sight. The stone ended up built into houses in Lewes, mostly into fireplaces. Pickup trucks came from as far as Seaford to collect stone for the fireplace at the American Legion post.
And then a very human thing happened. The quarry that had supplied the original tower saw the demand and shipped fresh stone down to Lewes, to sell to the people who had missed out.
So a certain amount of the "lighthouse stone" in Lewes fireplaces is genuine, and a certain amount is ordinary granite from the same quarry, sold to people who wanted a piece of the story. There is no reliable way to tell them apart now.
Seeing it today
There is nothing to climb. What you can do is stand at The Point or on the ocean beach and understand that the tower was out there, and that the water you are looking at is where a quarter mile of Delaware used to be.
The Zwaanendael Museum in Lewes covers this and the rest of the cape's wreck history, and it is free.
Not to be confused with the Delaware Breakwater East End Light — the red-topped tower you can see from the ferry and from Lewes Beach. That one is still standing. It is a different light, on the breakwater, and it is not the one that fell.