Drum Point Lighthouse

The Drum Point Lighthouse is one of only four surviving screw-pile lighthouses on the Chesapeake Bay, and one of the best preserved in the country. Built in eighteen eighty-three, it marked the mouth of the Patuxent River for nearly eighty years. Seven wrought-iron screw piles, bored by hand into the Bay floor, lifted a cottage-style keeper's quarters above the water, a design that let ice and storm surge pass beneath rather than topple the structure.

The light guided oyster boats, steamships, and military vessels until it was decommissioned in nineteen sixty-two. Then, rather than demolish it, Calvert County moved the entire lighthouse ashore in the nineteen seventies. Today it stands at the Calvert Marine Museum, fully restored, a rare survivor of the Bay's nineteenth-century lighthouse fleet.