Cape Henlopen and the Vanished Lighthouse

Just north of town, the land curls out into the Atlantic at Cape Henlopen, the sandy hook that guards the mouth of Delaware Bay. On that cape once stood one of the oldest lighthouses in America. The Cape Henlopen Light was built from seventeen sixty seven to seventeen sixty nine, making it the sixth lighthouse raised on the Atlantic coast, a tower that guided ships into the bay for more than a century and a half.

It kept its light until nineteen twenty four, when it was abandoned after a fierce storm in nineteen twenty had chewed away the sand beneath it. The dunes it had stood on were migrating, and the ground simply gave out. On April thirteenth of nineteen twenty six, the great old tower toppled off its undermined dune and crashed onto the beach below.

Souvenir hunters carried off the rubble. The shifting sands that doomed the lighthouse are the same restless dunes that make Cape Henlopen so striking now, a state park of walking dunes, pine woods, and wide empty beach, where the sand still shifts over the spot where Delaware's lost colonial beacon stood.