Curator's Choice

Episode 44: Drum Point Lighthouse

• Episode 44

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Step aboard a journey through time as we illuminate the remarkable tale of the Drum Point Lighthouse! Your host Ayla Sparks and guest Kevin Allor guide you through the immersive chronicles of this iconic beacon and the dedicated souls who tended to its flame. From guiding vessels through the Chesapeake Bay's misty waters in the 1800s to its triumphant resurgence following years of neglect, the Drum Point Lighthouse's saga is as captivating as the resilient keepers who ensured its luminance never dimmed.

🏡 Cottage-Style Design and Daily Keeper Lives  💡 
Step into the quaint quarters of the Drum Point Lighthouse and explore the ingenious screw pile cottage-style design that anchored it in the soft silt of the Chesapeake Bay. Experience the daily challenges of isolation faced by the keepers and delve into their captivating stories forever etched in lighthouse logbooks.


📚 U.S. Lighthouse Service Library Box   📖  
Explore the day-to-day life of the Weems and Yeatman families who made it their home. Their narratives, marked by ingenuity and resilience, reveal the reality of living in isolation, relying on innovative solutions for supply deliveries, and the comfort brought by the US Lighthouse Service Library boxes – a fascinating traveling library that brought literary treasures to the keepers and their families. 

📜 A Legacy Preserved  🖋️ 
Through meticulous record-keeping and relics from the Drum Point Lighthouse, this episode pieces together a life of reliance on the Chesapeake's bounty, the innovative use of fog warning systems, and the personal triumphs amidst societal upheavals, including Prohibition and World War II. Heartwarming heroics and lively tales of illicit activities color the history of these guardians of the light. 

 🔗  Episode Links  
Calvert Marine Museum: https://www.calvertmarinemuseum.com/

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Kevin Allor:

And they're hilarious too, especially from the 19th century, like around the time of the Civil War, a lot of people were like rum runners. Lighthousekeepers are like facilitating the illegal booze trade. And again during the prohibition years. It's hilarious.

Ayla Sparks:

Hi, I'm Aila Sparks and this is Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers. From ancient relics to modern marvels. Each episode of the show features a new museum and a Curator's Choice of some amazing artifacts housed there. These guardians of history will share insights, anecdotes and the often untold stories that breathe life into the artifacts they protect. Thanks for tuning in to this mighty Oak Media production and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Curator's Choice.

Ayla Sparks:

Today on the show, the amazing history of my favorite navigational aid, the Jerome Point Lighthouse. Our guest, kevin A Lore, senior interpreter at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomon's, maryland, takes us on a journey through treacherous waters, conservation eras, resourceful lightkeepers and traveling libraries. In this episode that transcends time and tides, we'll be exploring the unique screwpile design that anchors the lighthouse into the Chesapeake Bay and the daily lives of the lighthouse keepers that serviced them. Delve into the fascinating traveling libraries that brought a variety of books to the isolated lighthouse keepers and their families, and the life-saving light that shines from furnell lenses atop this cottage-style lighthouse. From weather extremes to raising beagles above the water, this episode will give you a glimpse of the trials, tribulations and incredible self-sufficiency of those who kept the lights, so, without further ado, let's jump right in with Kevin.

Kevin Allor:

So the Jerome Point Lighthouse was a navigational aid that guided in steamboats to the Solomon's steamboat landing from 1883. And then it continued to run until 1962, even though by that point the age of steamships was already ended. It sat at Jerome Point and attended and just deteriorating from neglect and vandalism until 1975, where we moved it to the museum to restore it. So this was one of those things that happened in the 1970s. There was a rush of different institutions trying to save what are now considered national historic landmarks but really weren't before that. So this includes Mount Vernon, it includes so many different historic homes. It was sort of a decade of preservation and that was our goal was to take this really important piece of maritime history and preserve it.

Ayla Sparks:

So for this lighthouse, what is the process of moving an entire lighthouse? And it was intact. They didn't take it apart, right?

Kevin Allor:

So it was sort of. It was fortuitous because during the 1970s so where we positioned in southern Maryland, Solomon's Island is on one side of the Patuxent River and then we have a major naval air station on the other side of the river. It had already been built. People from both sides of the river were working there, but they were traveling by boat. There was no bridge connecting the two counties, so they were building the bridge and so the company that was doing that, BF Diamond, which I think was out of Georgia.

Kevin Allor:

They already had all of the equipment necessary to move something like this screw pile lighthouse. So because it was a big contract for them and we were already paying a lot of money to have them here and supposedly there were also maybe some things that happened and this was offered as a way to get them some good press they just took a day, brought some barges up to the lighthouse and some cranes, cut the lighthouse off at the waterline, leaving the screws in drum point, set the lighthouse on a barge and then just floated it up the river and then into back creek, which is where the museum abuts to, and put it in. It's really cool when you see older photographs from my childhood of the lighthouse, because we hadn't created our boat base in here, so it was just a lighthouse sitting in the middle of a field.

Ayla Sparks:

That's so out of place. Yes, yes, you did have to restore it because it was in some pretty rough shape.

Kevin Allor:

Yeah. So none of the windows or doors were in place. There were big holes in the roof and floors and it had been through from 1962 to 1975, all of those summers of teenagers looking for something to do on a lazy summer day. What did they do? They climbed up the lighthouse bonfires. There was evidence of that. There were beer cans everywhere.

Ayla Sparks:

Their initials are carved all over the lantern room of the lighthouse which you can still see today when you go up there.

Kevin Allor:

Oh yeah.

Ayla Sparks:

And what's cool about the Drumpoen lighthouse is it is a particularly unique style of lighthouse.

Kevin Allor:

So it's a screw pile lighthouse. At first in the Chesapeake Bay, like most other regions, we would build towers. But the Chesapeake Bay has some geological issues, I guess you'd say. The bay itself is flooded by the Atlantic Ocean, and so as the sea level rises, the Chesapeake Bay continues to grow, even now, and the land is subsiding at the same time. So we have this underwater landscape that is different from other areas.

Kevin Allor:

We needed to put our lighthouses in the water because the obstacles were not near rocky shorelines, they were 300, 400 yards offshore. So the screw pile design anchors in to whatever the base is. So in the Chesapeake Bay it's a mucky soft silt. The screws anchor down and then there's a system of cross rigging above that, above water, where it can be tightened and keep everything level. So it was a very economical way to tackle this problem of putting lighthouses in the water. There were 42 of them at one point in time, and today only four have survived. And there's a good reason for that too, because while this is an economical design, it doesn't mean it was going to stand up to everything. And in the 19th century, after the Civil War, so from, let's say, the 1860s up through the 1890s, there were a series of brutally cold winters, and the ice buildup on the Chesapeake Bay actually destroyed countless screw pile lighthouses.

Ayla Sparks:

And if you think about it by its own nature, I mean it's in the water and anything that's gonna be in brackish or salty water is just gonna road much quicker anyways. Yes, but it was particularly so during those icy periods because the ice would literally shear them off, the screw pile foundations, which is just crazy, and I remember hearing about one in particular where the lighthouse was sheared off and it floated down river for like four or five miles on an ice sheet.

Kevin Allor:

With the keeper on it.

Ayla Sparks:

Oh, I didn't know. The keeper was on it. Wow, yes, so the screw pile lighthouses. They were very popular in the Chesapeake Bay and currently today the Chesapeake Bay doesn't really freeze over anymore. But it's just insane to picture this poor lighthouse keeper floating on the ice and there was no rescue. There was no one coming to save you.

Kevin Allor:

It happened numerous times. Several lighthouse keepers perished when this happened over exposure to the elements and you know this is before OSHA. Like there was no regulatory agency making sure workers were protected, A lot of lighthouse keepers didn't have the best experience.

Ayla Sparks:

But I mean now it's nice, it's got a nice dock around it, there's a boat basin and it's surrounded by water and it's about as high as it would have been out of the water when it was actually in drumpoint.

Kevin Allor:

Yeah, chesapeake Bay lighthouses. So it's not just the screw pile design, it's also the fact that the bay is very long. I think if you were to unravel all the tributaries in the Chesapeake Bay it's longer than the West Coast, but it's not very wide. So most points are only six or seven miles wide. So they're short lighthouses. They didn't need to be tall like the coastal lighthouses. It's only 30, 40 feet above water.

Ayla Sparks:

And you'd only need to see the light a few miles away, right, Like never more than the widest point I think of the Chesapeake Bay as seven miles or something like that but even with a short distance, you still needed to have a light source at the top of the lighthouse.

Kevin Allor:

So Fresnel lenses were just a part of lighthouses by the time drumpoint was built in 1883. And it had a couple that it used. The characteristic of a light could be flashing in a pattern. It could be a color pattern and drumpoint did change. So the current lens up there it's a fourth order Fresnel lens. They come in seven orders and a fourth order or a fifth order lens is what we have in most of the Chesapeake Bay. They're really for rivers and since the Chesapeake Bay is basically a giant river, they work.

Kevin Allor:

This one was put in in 1911.

Kevin Allor:

And part of the lens it's missing.

Kevin Allor:

It's three quarters of it, because part of it faced the shore and then the parts of the lens that angled out into the river in the bay had red panels installed to mark out all of the shoals that had built up. And there we have a navigational chart under the lighthouse just to show people how insane it was. If you're looking at the river from the shoreline right next to the northern shore, coming out of Solomon's, the depth of the water is nine feet right next to the shore and then 20 feet just off of it, but then about 200 yards off it gets two feet deep. So if you're a sailboat, you're gonna ram right into the two feet of water. So these panels, these red panels, helped really simplify navigation, because the captain just needed to look at the lighthouse and if the light was red, they're gonna look at their chart and they're gonna continue a course to the center of the river and then, as soon as the light turned white, that was their clear shot out of the river and into the bay, or vice versa.

Ayla Sparks:

And they also had a cartographer that would come out every so often because I mean, you're talking about the shifting sands on the bottom of a very active river, so it would change even if you had it memorized.

Kevin Allor:

And there were. You know they weren't calling them hurricanes at that time, but there were. I mean, every summer there were these big storms and they would shift everything around. So I think there don't quote me on this one Bay Hydrografer, I think is what it was, the group that would come and just map everything out.

Ayla Sparks:

And also because of that, when the lighthouse was first installed it was quite a ways offshore, but by the time the museum had moved it it was almost on land.

Kevin Allor:

Yes, it had all built up over time. So originally it was in maybe seven to 10 feet of water and by the time they moved it it was completely out of water at low tide. So people today as they sail by a drum point, if you're going by at low tide you can see the pilings just sticking right out, which is really cool.

Ayla Sparks:

And being screwpile lighthouses. They have gigantic iron screws at the bottom of each of those pilings and they were basically augured down into the sand and I think they were done by a company in Baltimore. They were like prefab lighthouses, right.

Kevin Allor:

Yeah, so there were actually three different organizations that ran lighthouses over the course of Drum Point's history. So when they built it in 1883, it was the lighthouse board that was running lighthouses. And out of Baltimore there's a place called Lazaretto Point and most lighthouses were fabricated there. So it's using Baltimore ironworks for the metal and then local timber, and Drum Point is really interesting. There's another lighthouse in the bay called Hooper Straight Lighthouse and that lighthouse is the same as Drum Point. They were prefabricated. So at Lazaretto Point they had all the ironworks done, but then they built the house that would go on top of the frame and then just knocked it down in big pieces, sent it down to Drum Point, built a platform so they could screw in the pilings and then, once that was built, everything went up very quickly because of that.

Ayla Sparks:

Yeah, it was like a crazy record time from when they started. It was like 30 days from when they started until they lit the light for the first time. So the lighthouse you said the first group of people who were kind of managing lighthouses this was back before there was really a country-wide organization that was specifically running lighthouses.

Kevin Allor:

So there was the US Lighthouse establishment. So that was started back at the very end of the 1700s, right after the Revolutionary War, and then, I think in the 1850s, it went to the lighthouse board and these were both parts of the Treasury Department. And then again in 1910, they did a shift and it became the US Lighthouse Society or US Lighthouse Service, sometimes it's called the Bureau of Lighthouses, and that was a shift. Basically, before that it was sort of quasi-military, so the board was full of like a mixture of business people and like the admirals, things like that, and a lot of the people serving on lighthouses were former soldiers. In 1910, it was a shift to more civilian, and some really important things happened then, like creating a retirement program for lighthouse keepers. And then again there was a switch in 1939, the US Lighthouse Service dissolved and everything came under the United States Coast Guard.

Ayla Sparks:

And along with these different changes between different organizations who were running it, it kind of also changed the structure of the lighthouse keepers themselves. So, like you said earlier, at first it was more a retired military personnel, but then, once the lighthouse service took over, it was kind of more of individuals, and that's where we get a lot of the really cool, in my opinion, the really cool lighthouse stories, because it was individuals who came and they brought their families. So during that time period before the Coast Guard took over, what was life like with the lighthouse keepers here?

Kevin Allor:

Oh, so you'd have lighthouse keepers and their assistants. Basically and this continued actually into like the US Lighthouse Service it depended on location. So they did not want, for many reasons, did not want families living five miles from civilization, out in the middle of the water. But in the Chesapeake Bay a lot of these locations, such as Drum Point, were only two miles from the nearest town and so many of the early keepers at Drum Point Lighthouse had families with them. So we've restored our lighthouse to like the 1910 period and the family that was there were the Weems family James Lock Weems and his wife Maria. They had five children at first that they moved to the lighthouse with and then in 1906, their granddaughter was born in the lighthouse, anna, and Anna is the reason why we were able to sort of pinpoint that time and recreate it, because she had the memories, the photographs, everything that was needed to do that, and because when we got the lighthouse in 1975, it had no furniture, as we discussed, it was just a husk.

Ayla Sparks:

And she did come with some. Like I said, there's not a lot of original artifacts because that's just the nature of the beast, but she was actually able to bring some of her grandparents' artifacts.

Kevin Allor:

Absolutely. And then there are also some local families who were keepers who are still here. So the Yatements were the next family after the Weems is, and there's a model of a Chesapeake Bay log canoe, which is a style of sailing boat that is in the lighthouse. That was made by that keeper for his five children who played with it under the lighthouse.

Ayla Sparks:

So, looking at the design of a cottage-style lighthouse, you can go inside and it is completely decorated as it would have been when Anna was a young grandchild during the 1910s, so and it's from her memory and it's really quite accurate for that time period. So why don't you kind of walk us through the style? What does a cottage-style lighthouse look like on its different floors?

Kevin Allor:

Yeah, so the ground floor of the lighthouse well, it's not really the ground because it's up in the air, but you know the first floor it's four rooms, basically A dining room, a kitchen, a bedroom and a living space, and three of them we have furnished pretty accurately for the time. So the dining room has a coal-burning stove and a coal closet. It's got a older-style sewing machine like a treadle sewing machine. It has my favorite artifact, which is the US Lighthouse Service Library.

Ayla Sparks:

Oh, I love the library boxes. They were my favorite, my favorite artifact. So, first off, how did they get these library boxes?

Kevin Allor:

When they were living on the lighthouses, supplies were delivered by tender ships and it varied based on their needs. So the more offshore lights had more frequent deliveries, ones like drumpoint less frequent. It was all fuel dry goods such as coffee and sugar.

Ayla Sparks:

A lot of that was provided by the Lighthouse Service kind of part of their payment. You know, here's your living here and here's your sheltered pork.

Kevin Allor:

Yeah, there was basic fuel too the coal, wood for their kitchen stove and then kerosene for their light. And that's Drumpoint was kerosene and then electricity. That's how it ran Before 1883 and the 1870s. They made that switch and the lighthouse board. But you could do things like order a case of books from the Lighthouse Service Library. So we have one of these cases just under the window. It's a nice touch. Exercise the brain and the imagination. All of that, which is crucial because lighthouses were isolating, very, very isolating. So this is probably was a treasured resource for them. And then you finish in a few months and then you send away for another set.

Ayla Sparks:

I wanted to pop in here and give you a little more information about these amazing library boxes. So the Lighthouse Establishment launched their portable libraries initiative in 1876. These libraries were kept in those wooden boxes. They were very durable and they were easily stacked, so they could be stacked multiple high on a tendership, and each of these boxes could hold between 50 and 60 books. Each library box was numbered. At one point in time there were about 350 of these boxes in circulation and each box had a printed listing of all of its contents.

Ayla Sparks:

And these many libraries were pretty serious business. As with everything in a lighthouse, they were required to be maintained to very high standards. So each book that was removed from the library box had to be recorded. It had to have the name of the person removing it and the date that it was removed. And every time a lighthouse inspector made his quarterly rounds he would look in it to check the condition of the box, all of its books, and he closely looked to make sure that everything was in order. And if there were any infractions they handed out quite a penalty to these lighthouse keepers, anywhere from a fine to replacing the books if they were in poor condition. I have to say, as an avid book reader myself, I get it.

Ayla Sparks:

So in these boxes there were all kinds of books. There were mostly fiction books, but a lot of other genres were included. There were technical books and romance novels, magazines, recipes, hymnals, all kinds. Some examples of these books Seasons with the Seahorses by James Lamont. It was a thrilling tale of sailing and sporting adventure in the Northern Seas. Another noteworthy book was my Apingi Kingdom Life in the Great Sahara and Sketches of the Chase of the Ostrich and Hyena by Paul Dushalu, which even by today's standard sounds pretty interesting. But when you consider some of these lifeguard keepers and their families, this was probably quite the adventure to read about.

Ayla Sparks:

So these library boxes. They traveled from station to station all along the coast and we know all of this information in part by a man named Arnold B Johnson. He was the chief clerk of the United States Lighthouse Board and he described these libraries in the February 1885 issue of the library journal. Johnson writes a library may start from the light station at Eastport, michigan, and work its way clear around the coast, stopping at every large lighthouse in every Atlantic and Gulf state to the Mexican frontier, then, after visiting every lighthouse on the lakes, finally makes a tour of the lights on the Pacific coast. Johnson also remarks these libraries embarked on journeys around the coast, enriching the lives of lighthouse keepers and their families at every stop. All right, let's get back to Kevin for the next step on our audio adventure the Drum Point Lighthouse Kitchen.

Kevin Allor:

So what's really prominent in the kitchen is one of these rain barrels. The Chesapeake Bay is filled with brackish water, which is great for seafood and not so great for anything else that you would need to use water for, so they collected rainwater, each in these giant barrels that just hook right out into the outside gutter system, and each broom on the first floor of the lighthouse has one of these massive. It's really more of a cistern. So with all of those combined they had plenty of water for washing up dishes, and at that time rainwater is the freshest water you were ever going to get, minus, I guess, the seagull droppings that would maybe wash off the roof and into the bottom of the tank. But see the kitchen also. There's like a pantry filled with dry goods.

Kevin Allor:

We don't do too much with the food though, because, based on what Anna told us and just other evidence from the time period, we know these were incredibly self-sufficient people. They were feeding themselves off of the little bit of property that was attached to the lighthouse during the growing season and then the rest of the year oysters, crabs, fish, shrimp they're just constantly and a big one was waterfowl, because after eating the ducks they could use all of the feathers and the down to make pillows, mattresses, jackets, all of that stuff. They were not a people that had access to big box stores. Everything, aside from maybe a pair of shoes, they would need to make themselves.

Ayla Sparks:

They were incredibly resourceful. So the fourth room on this fourth floor is more or less more open. It has a great panel on the side that shares interesting or special events recorded by lighthouse keepers and there is a closet that has some really heavy weights in it. What are these weights for? There's something of the fog warning system.

Kevin Allor:

So that was a fog signal, and the mechanical striker for the bell, which runs off of a counterweight system, so the weights themselves are in a closet. On the first floor, in the living room, which is pretty nice, there's also a bell company telephone, the style that you spoke into the little piece, and there are no phone numbers, so there's no buttons. That's always fun to point out to kids. There's a set of a dining service for the US Lighthouse service, which they sometimes gave away as retirement gifts or appreciation gifts. There is what the lighthouse was replaced with, which is a solar powered light, and then the panel that shows all the keepers. It does mention some weird things, like a keeper that raised beagles in the lighthouse.

Ayla Sparks:

I was always curious about that, Like what are they doing with these beagle droppings? Because every time they needed to like let their dog outside, they would have had to have done it on the deck. I mean, they're not gonna take a boat on shore every time they have to go.

Kevin Allor:

That one would be really interesting to see like what the lighthouse inspectors said about that, Because I can. Just it had to smell atrocious in the lighthouse with all those beagles.

Ayla Sparks:

You guys should get a stuffed beagle and put it in the lighthouse as like a nod to the crazy dog guy who is also on that panel. That tells you all of the different fun entries on the logs. There are also some weather extremes listed on that log.

Kevin Allor:

There's an entry about one February where the bay froze and the lighthouse keepers are still trying to do their job and they write about how it's so cold that with a fire going in the room the water on the station froze. And then there's another one that goes from an August where they talk about the thermometer. They've got in the lighthouse reading 124 degrees. And then the 1933 hurricane that struck and had a storm surge that almost washed the lighthouse away. We've got just a bunch of different little stories. My favorite is the keeper who was stationed during World War II because they were doing practice maneuvers for what eventually was the D-Day invasion, right on the beach outside Drum Point Lighthouse. So we have that story. And then we've got the aerial photograph, because it was a very well photographed war of one of these transport vessel that's right there on the beach.

Ayla Sparks:

So how do we know all of this information about the lighthouse keepers?

Kevin Allor:

Oh, so they have very good records in our government and you can go through Coast Guard and find all of the files because the lighthouse service was absorbed by the Coast Guard so they have it all there in their archives. They're a number of really really great volunteer organizations, so we have the Lighthouse Society, so we have a Chesapeake chapter. If you go to their web pages they've got beautiful compilations of lighthouse records. You can pull up Drum Point Lighthouse and on their website and they'll show you every keeper, who is there, their dates of service, all of the major changes to the light, noteworthy things that happens.

Ayla Sparks:

And they kept such good records because they had to. They were required to write in them every day, and if they didn't, you know when their random inspections would just show up. They could get in trouble if they hadn't been keeping up daily to their standards.

Kevin Allor:

And they're hilarious too, especially from the 19th century, like around the time of the Civil War. A lot of people were like rum runners. They were lighthouse keepers are like facilitating the illegal, I guess, booze trade. And again during the prohibition years. It's hilarious. The lighthouse keepers were like if they weren't involved in it. You had to tip them off.

Ayla Sparks:

The intense lighthouse keepers. So there is also a really nice deck on the first floor where they hung the lighthouse boat.

Kevin Allor:

On the davits. That's something we're doing right now. So we have a small craft guild at the museum and they are building the original to the original plans. They're building the lighthouse boat.

Ayla Sparks:

And also on that railing is a lovely little outhouse that just hangs over the railing and so you would do your business and it would just drop right down to the water. So that is the first floor. Then you go and you start going up the spiral staircase in the middle and that takes you to the second floor.

Kevin Allor:

Technically, the second floor, like when you step off, is all working space of a lighthouse. It has a mechanical striker for the bell, the specifics on how it worked, a little panel that explains that. There's a story that goes with that At the close of the 1920s there was a man and a woman taking care of the lighthouse and they, due to family tragedy, ended up as the guardians of their niece. And so this 10 year old girl is at the lighthouse and she has a friend who's over to visit, and the two adults have left these two girls at the lighthouse. They've gone in to Solomon's it's about a two hour trip in and this is one of those instances where you just have unexpected weather shifts.

Kevin Allor:

Maybe a front was coming through and it created fog and the girls knew they had to run the bell to warn the mariners. So they're really bright kids. They knew what they had to do. They just couldn't get the machine to work. It's very simple mechanics, but for these two 10 year olds they couldn't figure out how to start it and so they took turns manually ringing the bell until the adults were able to make it back. If you look at this machine, the chain that runs in the weights are suspended from it. It's like a bike chain, and we all know what happens with bike chains they slip, and so, if that happens, one person on your team has to fix that, while the other person is manually striking the bell.

Ayla Sparks:

One thing I do wanna make sure that I mentioned. It's my favorite thing about the bells, and it's such an ingenious design. So every single lighthouse had a different system of their bells ringing like a different pattern. So if you were at drum point lighthouse and it was foggy, you couldn't see anything, but you could still hear it's like two rings every 15 seconds and that was the pattern for that lighthouse. So if you heard that, then you knew that you were at the drum point lighthouse. However, if it was something like one bell every seven seconds, then it was a different lighthouse and that is just. That is so smart. What a genius way to do it.

Kevin Allor:

And all of your navigational charts would have this information by the way. So they would have the sound signatures, they would have the light characteristic, so if it flashed it would tell you how often it flashed. And then the other part which we didn't mention is the daymarks of the lighthouse, which is how they're painted and designed. So drum point is it's a screw pile lighthouse, it's a cottage screw pile, so it looks like a little house, but it's a hexagon shaped house. It's got white walls and a red roof and a black cupola on the top, green shutters. No other screw pile on the Chesapeake Bay could have all of those elements so that on a clear day the ship captain can just look and see okay, hexagon, screw pile, green shutters, its drum point. And that's the reason why you know everyone who has their coastal lighthouses. Some of them have diamonds, some of them have stripes and the red and white, black and white that's the same reason Daymarks. And then the second floor has a mechanical striker for the bell. So we have that and it's, you know, right in the middle of the room. It's a huge feature. But then across from it is this simple table. It's a little metal tray that's extended from the wall. It has a kerosene can on it and a kerosene lamp, and that is where they filled all of their lamps.

Kevin Allor:

Lighthouses were made out of wood. Mostly. You're using kerosene as your light source. It's a huge fire hazard. So they had this station to do the lamps and we talked about the inspectors coming just out of the blue. This is one thing they were looking for If they came through and it looked like you had been keeping up with your maintenance. The lens is beautiful. It's polished to like you could see reflection in it. There are no areas where it needs to be painted. They've taken care of all of that. This looks good. But then they go through the dining room and see a stack of lamps like where the wicks are being trimmed or something. Well, they're going to get a huge demerit for that, because it's a fire hazard.

Ayla Sparks:

And it all had to be done on that little metal shelf because it had the little lip around it to catch.

Kevin Allor:

Yeah, to catch all of that and to catch the oil. They're kerosene rather, so we have that side, and then just opposite is a watch room, so it's where the person with the duty of taking care of the light would sleep for the night. And lighthouse keepers did not sleep like we do. They're not, oh I got my eight hours.

Kevin Allor:

They could get eight hours, but it was in chunks, so they would set alarms and basically every two hours they had to get up and make sure everything was still running smoothly, because the reason why they're there is to provide a steady, unwavering navigational aid, and that's not going to be the case if the lamp burns out in the middle of the night. And if you think about it, it's a lot like these people had newborns that never matured, never grew up, so it's like all night long they're just getting up, getting up getting up.

Ayla Sparks:

So then you go up to the third and final floor. I mean, it's not really much of a floor, it's kind of just a tiny platform.

Kevin Allor:

That's where you have the fourth order for now lens, the red panels, so you can see all of the graffiti on the walls from those teenagers. A hatch to access the outer decks. And while you're standing on that level, looking out of the windows at this beautiful view, you'll notice that the stove pipe is ridiculously tall. It extends up over the roof of the lighthouse by like 15 feet, and that is so. The smoke from the stoves did not interfere with the light signal.

Ayla Sparks:

So can you tell us a typical day of a lighthouse keeper?

Kevin Allor:

Sure. So it would start early in the morning with extinguishing the light. At sunrise the light would be extinguished. Many of these lights would have curtains in the lantern room that they would then shut for the day. Then the keeper would spend most of the rest of the morning polishing the lens. Hours and hours of meticulous polishing with linen cloths because they don't leave lint behind would polish all the brass and crystal, and this would take them probably till noon lunchtime. Then they might come down, make some notes in the logbook about the weather, do painting projects, so maybe the shutters get painted one week and then the siding gets painted the next.

Kevin Allor:

The Chesapeake Bay has got lots of salt in the water. It's going to corrode everything, so it's constant maintenance. They might then take the boat into Solomon's to get their mail, which was their favorite thing to do get supplies. They usually did that twice a week, so they'd set aside two weeks for that. If it was the growing season they would be tending to corn, tomatoes, those types of things that they were growing on shore. They might send somebody for water they had a pump well so they might get some drinking water to bring back.

Ayla Sparks:

And wouldn't they also sometimes have not huge livestock, but they would have chickens on shore.

Kevin Allor:

Yeah, and some of the offshore lights actually kept the chickens and pigs even on the storage platform, really Just penned up so they could use them. They also probably did some fishing duck hunting and then you're getting to the close of the day. In the winter season they would start eating dinner very early, maybe 3.3, 30 in the afternoon, because at four o'clock there's no light left. This is something we take for granted, just all of the light sources we have around. So if you can imagine being out on the Chesapeake Bay and you're really just getting moonlight and start, it's going to be inky blackness. So they would end their day really early. As soon as the sun set, the light needed to be on and then they started those two-hour watches.

Ayla Sparks:

Yeah, and with the lighthouse keepers, there would be one main keeper, but then there'd also be an assistant, a lighthouse assistant, and so you did have help doing these activities, because the lighthouse always had to be manned by somebody. If there wasn't a lighthouse assistant, though, then the wife would often act as the lighthouse assistant An unpaid one, I might add and that's how they preferred it, because then they didn't have to pay anyone to be a lighthouse assistant. But then you're thinking taking care of the kids. If you had a family, so if you had a like a literate wife, then she could be the one to homeschool them. If not, then they would go to school onshore. Actually, the building that is the administrative building at the Marine Museum is one of those old schools that the students would go to. They sometimes even had a school boat instead of a school bus that would pick the kids up.

Ayla Sparks:

But you're still talking about feeding all everyone. You're talking about doing all the laundry, I mean and, like you said, they had to be very self-sufficient. They're canning fruits and veggies and cooking. Cooking in itself just takes forever. So they're doing regular living, but it's different because it's living on the lighthouse. So you're doing lighthouse living and lighthouse duties.

Kevin Allor:

And some of these assistant keepers were the keepers' wives. There was one in the 30s who was much better at managing the radio than her husband was, so she was doing all of the radio communications. We have one we know about who was a much stronger swimmer than her husband, and on the Chesapeake Bay Lighthouses they had to do rescues, so she was the rescue swimmer for every single time they had to go and rescue some unfortunate fools out in the Chesapeake Bay.

Ayla Sparks:

Usually drunken sailors. Yes, that's right, that's right.

Kevin Allor:

So everyone's got a lot of tasks to do. But then there's downtime too, which they're going to crack into that library, or they're going to invite the local watermen over for a game of cards. And most of the lighthouse keepers were beloved by the local watermen who saw them every day, often stopped into chat On their breaks. They would give them gifts of fish crabs. All of that.

Ayla Sparks:

And, just like today, is a novelty. People wanted to come and visit and spend the night in a lighthouse.

Kevin Allor:

Absolutely. Especially if it's a nice day, they could sit on the lower decks or out on the and you're just surrounded by the water and the breeze, you know.

Ayla Sparks:

Yeah, the lighthouse is pretty awesome and the museum is as well, so the museum covers a lot.

Kevin Allor:

We have got the maritime history of the area which covers Southern Maryland the war of 1812 during World War II, the native peoples of the Patuxent, which are going to be the Piscataway people. We've got the whole history of the steamboats and the oyster canneries that were in the area, ship building. But then we also have a full aquarium covering the life that is in the Chesapeake Bay estuary. We have a huge section for paleontology because one of our geological features is the Calvary Cliffs, which has probably the best, most complete fossil beds for the Miocene in North America. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. People see it and they think, oh, we could do this and we can do this in 45 minutes. And then two hours later they're like, oh, we have to come back.

Ayla Sparks:

The museum really is a little gem because I feel like it's not super well known, but anyone who has been here is like, like, this is the place to be, and I was lucky enough to actually work here with all of these amazing landmarks.

Kevin Allor:

So we actually have three or four historic landmarks two lighthouses, the oyster cannery, and then the longest running passenger vessel in the Chesapeake Bay, which is called the William v Tennyson, which is a converted bug eye.

Ayla Sparks:

It's an amazing vessel and they used to have a first mate aboard the vessel who would give you a tour like you would not believe, and they just can't seem to get rid of her. So you just keep coming back. But, kevin, thank you so much for sharing this museum and I just I just like seeing you in general, and this was a great excuse, thank you so much.

Ayla Sparks:

Thank you so much for tuning in and supporting Curator's Choice, a mighty oak media production. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing and rating the show on Apple podcasts, spotify, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you love a museum and would like to hear it featured in an episode, shoot me a message at Curator's Choice podcast at gmailcom. I'll do my best to reach out and see if I can get them to be on the show. You can also view articles, artifacts and more by following us on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening to Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers.