The Lighthouse Before the City Was There

Stand at the north end of the island, near Absecon Inlet, and you can see the lighthouse that predates the city's entire tourist era. The Absecon Lighthouse stands a hundred and seventy-one feet tall, the tallest in New Jersey and the third-tallest masonry lighthouse in the United States. Its red brick tower has been here since eighteen fifty-seven, lit two years before the Civil War began, designed by a lieutenant of engineers named George Meade, the same George Meade who would command the Union Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg six years later.

Meade built it to solve a specific problem. The inlet here had long been called Graveyard Inlet, and not ironically. Before the lighthouse went up, ships running up the New Jersey coast in fog or storm regularly drove aground on the shoals of Absecon Inlet.

Wrecks were common enough to name the place. Pitney, the same physician who pushed for the railroad, had also lobbied Congress for a lighthouse, arguing that the inlet was a genuine hazard to navigation. The light first shone on January fifteenth, eighteen fifty-seven.

Its original Fresnel lens, shipped from Paris, weighs more than twelve thousand pounds. On a clear night the beam reaches nearly twenty nautical miles offshore. The lighthouse was deactivated as a navigational aid in nineteen thirty-three, made obsolete by modern navigation.

But the light still shines every night, and the tower still stands, its two hundred and twenty-eight steps open to visitors who want to look out at the same Atlantic that, for so long before this city existed, sailors crossed without a reliable light to guide them in.