Lighthouse Collection

Standing 165 feet over Anastasia Island since 1874, the St. Augustine Lighthouse is one of the most recognizable beacons on the Atlantic coast. Its black-and-white spiral daymark — painted in bold barber-pole stripes so mariners could distinguish it from other towers by day — cuts against Florida sky at any hour. The tower replaced an earlier Spanish watchtower that had guarded the inlet since the 1500s, making this stretch of coast one of the longest continuously marked in the Western Hemisphere.

Inside, a cast-iron staircase winds 219 steps to the lantern room, each tread worn smooth by a century and a half of keepers and visitors. The spiral is one of the most photographed interiors on the Atlantic — a black-and-white geometry of iron, light, and negative space that draws the eye straight up through the center of the tower. The original first-order Fresnel lens is gone, replaced by a modern optic, but the tower still throws light 24 nautical miles out to sea.

It earns its place in the collection at dusk — when the lantern room catches the last warm light, the marsh behind it goes quiet, and the oldest continuously inhabited city in America settles into another evening beneath its beam. The keeper's house at its base, painted in Victorian red, now serves as a maritime museum, but the tower itself remains what it has always been: a fixed point on a shifting coast.

The third tower to bear the name, Bodie Island Lighthouse has stood watch over the northern Outer Banks since 1872 — 156 feet of white brick banded with two bold black horizontal stripes. The first tower, built in 1847, leaned so badly it had to be abandoned. The second was destroyed by retreating Confederate forces in 1861. This one held. Its horizontal bands were a deliberate daymark — the only one of its kind on the Carolina coast — so that mariners approaching from sea could identify it instantly against the flat barrier island horizon.

Its original first-order Fresnel lens, one of the few still operating in the United States, remains in the lantern room — a handmade masterpiece of French glass and brass that has been throwing its beam 19 nautical miles across Oregon Inlet and the barrier islands for over 150 years. The lens alone weighs more than a ton and produces a signature flash pattern that sailors still use for navigation. When the Park Service restored the tower and reopened it to climbers in 2013, they made the deliberate choice to keep the original lens in place.

The tower sits in a stretch of marshland between Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic, surrounded by nothing but reeds, sky, and the low hum of wind through sea grass. There are no towns nearby, no boardwalks, no gift shops crowding its base — just the keeper's quarters, the marsh, and the light. At dawn the reflection doubles in the still water at its base. At dusk the black bands disappear into shadow and the white brick catches the last pink light off the sound. It is the quietest lighthouse on the Outer Banks, and the most honest.

Old Baldy is the oldest standing lighthouse in North Carolina — 110 feet of octagonal brick, finished in 1817, guarding the mouth of the Cape Fear River where it meets the Atlantic. Its name was earned, not given. The original whitewashed plaster has weathered off in mottled patches over two centuries, leaving a streaked, uneven surface that looks more like a piece of pottery than a tower. The Coast Guard could have repainted it any time in the last hundred years; the island chose not to. The patina is the daymark now.

Inside, a wooden staircase climbs through landings of heavy heart pine to a small lantern room at the top. Old Baldy was decommissioned in 1935 — replaced by a more powerful light across the river — and its original lens is long gone. But the tower itself was preserved, restored by the Old Baldy Foundation, and now serves as a small museum to the keepers and pilots who once worked the treacherous Frying Pan Shoals just offshore. The shoals took hundreds of ships before the lights and channel markers caught up.

Bald Head Island is reachable only by passenger ferry from Southport — no cars allowed, only golf carts and bicycles. The lighthouse stands at the edge of the maritime forest, surrounded by live oaks, palmettos, and the slow creak of cicadas. From the lantern room you can see the river meeting the ocean, the long sweep of Cape Fear, and the working light at Oak Island flashing across the water. It is the gentlest lighthouse in the collection — retired, weathered, and still loved by an island that quietly refuses to let it go.

Sullivan's Island Lighthouse is unlike any other tower on the Atlantic coast — a triangular structure of aluminum and reinforced concrete rising 140 feet at the north end of Charleston Harbor, completed in 1962 to replace the abandoned Morris Island Light across the channel. Its three flat sides meet at sharp vertical edges, sheathed in a stark black-and-white daymark that was originally a high-visibility orange. The silhouette is more rocket gantry than lighthouse — a Cold War profile designed in the same decade as the Saturn V, by engineers who treated the tower as an antenna for light. Where every other lighthouse in the collection looks like it grew out of a coastline, Sullivan's looks like it was assembled.

It is the only American lighthouse with an elevator. There is no spiral staircase, no climb of a hundred and something steps to a lantern room — only an enclosed shaft running the height of the structure, designed so that keepers and Coast Guard technicians could ascend in uniform without losing their breath. The original beacon was rated at 28 million candlepower, briefly the second-most powerful lighthouse in the Western Hemisphere, visible 26 nautical miles out to sea. It was so bright that the Coast Guard had to dial it back to keep harbor pilots from being blinded on approach. The interior is closed to the public; the tower remains an active aid to navigation, run by Coast Guard Station Charleston from a base that has guided ships into this harbor for almost three centuries.

It stands at the edge of the maritime forest on the north end of Sullivan's Island, a few hundred yards from Fort Moultrie and within sight of Fort Sumter across the water. From its base the harbor opens — carriers and container ships moving up the channel, the Ravenel Bridge in the haze, salt marshes catching the last light of evening. Charleston spreads behind it, two and a half centuries old. The Morris Island Light — the tower this one replaced — still stands offshore, alone, surrounded by water, its keeper's house and dunes long since taken by the sea. Sullivan's is what came next: faster, harder, lit from within. It is the lighthouse the twentieth century thought a lighthouse should be, and the only one in the collection that does not pretend otherwise.

Hunting Island Lighthouse is 132 feet of cast iron and brick on a barrier island that has been retreating from the sea for the better part of two centuries. The original 1859 tower was destroyed during the Civil War — Confederate forces removed and disabled the apparatus to deny it to Union ships — and what stands today is the 1875 replacement, built deliberately of bolted iron plates so that it could be disassembled if the coastline ever demanded it. That contingency was not theoretical. By 1889 the Atlantic had eaten so much of the original site that the entire tower was unbolted, transported in sections 1.3 miles inland, and reassembled on the spot it occupies today. Its black-on-white daymark — black above, white below — is the cleanest in the collection. It was designed to move, and it did.

Inside, a cast-iron spiral staircase climbs 167 steps to the lantern room, the metalwork cool to the touch even in Lowcountry heat, the air thick with the smell of old paint and salt. The original second-order Fresnel lens was removed when the light was decommissioned in 1933, but the tower itself was preserved by the State of South Carolina and is now the only publicly accessible lighthouse in the state. Climbers ascend through small landings, each framed by a single porthole window that lets in a slice of pine forest, then sky, then the long flat horizon of the Atlantic. The lantern room sits 132 feet above a forest of loblolly pines and palmettos that did not exist when the light was first lit — the trees, like the lighthouse, are recent arrivals on a coastline that keeps moving.

Hunting Island is a state park now, but it does not feel curated. The road ends in maritime forest — pines, palmettos, live oaks draped in Spanish moss — and the lighthouse rises from the trees with no fanfare, no gift shop crowding its base, no parking lot at its foot. The beach beyond it is a slow disaster of erosion: tall pines toppled into the surf, bleached trunks half-buried in sand, the waterline creeping further inland every year. The Forrest Gump shrimp boat scenes were filmed on this beach. The skeleton trees lining the surf were standing forest a generation ago. The lighthouse stands inland of all of it now, watching its own coastline disappear, holding the ground it was relocated to a hundred and forty years ago and waiting to see whether it will need to move again.