Sparkplug lighthouses are cast iron structures built at offshore locations. The keeper's quarters is a round building, usually three stories in height. The round lantern room sits atop the keeper's quarters, and the whole structure rests on a solid foundation, usually a concrete or stone caisson. The Harbor of Refuge Light at Lewes, Delaware, shown at right, is a typical example. Completed in 1926, it is also the last one ever built. Because of their shape, these lighthouses have come to be called "sparkplugs." Before the day of gasoline engines, they were sometimes called "coffee pots." In many places they were called "bug lights," because at a distance they appeared short and broad, rather like a beetle on the surface of the water. Sparkplugs were prefabricated, brought to the site by barge, and put in place by floating cranes. They were a low-cost solution to the problem of providing offshore lighthouses in the sounds and bays of the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, where all but three of the surviving examples are located. |
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Surviving Sparkplug Towers
If sparkplug towers were deactivated, they became maintenance problems and hazards to navigation. Before the recent interest in lighthouse preservation took hold, the Coast Guard quickly demolished deactivated sparkplugs. As a result, most of the surviving examples are active lighthouses.
There are 33 surviving sparkplug lighthouses. Here they are, in (approximate) order of completion:
Of the 33 lighthouses, all but the first few have very similar, three-story designs. The oldest sparkplug, Plymouth Harbor's "bug light", has only two stories in the keeper's quarters. The Craighill Channel range light has a unique, single-story design. The Great Beds, Jeffrey's Hook, and Borden Flats lighthouses have relatively slender towers which must have provided cramped quarters for the keepers. Over the years the towers gradually became wider to allow for more generous crew space.
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Lost Sparkplugs
Here is a list of sparkplug lighthouses that have been lost:
Saving the Sparkplugs
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Preservation of sparkplug lighthouses is not an easy business. The iron towers rust and deteriorate quickly if they are not painted regularly. The towers are exposed to damage from waves, winter ice, and collision with ships. It was ice that pushed the Sharps Island Light over at a 15° angle in the winter of 1976-77 (see photo at left). A winter storm toppled the former Crabtree Ledge Light in Maine. Rust and decay caught up with the Deer Island Light in Boston Harbor, demolished in 1982. Some of the sparkplugs are close to shore, but most are several miles out in the water, too far for convenient access. The Coast Guard has acted to place many of them under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act process, with mixed results. Because it would be difficult to provide public access, preservation groups have been reluctant to accept ownership of these lighthouses, so many of them are being auctioned off to private owners. Several of these owners have invested heavily in restoring their lighthouses, but others seem overwhelmed by the task and have made little progress. Despite these difficulties, there have been a number of successful efforts to preserve sparkplug lighthouses.
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This makes 11 out of 33 sparkplugs under some sort of community-based preservation or preservation effort. Most of the remaining sparkplugs have been sold into private ownership. In a few cases this has worked well: private owners have restored the Borden Flats and Newport News Middle Ground lighthouses, for example. But in many cases the work has been too great for private owners.
As of September 2018 three sparkplugs were on the Lighthouse Digest Doomsday List: Bloody Point Bar, Romer Shoal, and Sharps Island.
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Posted January 16, 2002. Checked and revised September 19, 2018. Site copyright 2018 Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.