Cape Lookout Lighthouse: Model for the Outer Banks

Four miles south of this marker, rising one hundred sixty-three feet above Core Banks, stands one of the most important lighthouses ever built on the Atlantic coast. Congress appropriated forty-five thousand dollars in eighteen fifty-seven to replace an earlier and inadequate light from eighteen twelve, and the Army Corps of Engineers spent two years constructing the new brick tower. It was first lit on November first, eighteen fifty-nine.

Sailors had long called the waters off Cape Lookout a horrible headland, a graveyard of shoals stretching miles offshore. The new lighthouse, visible up to nineteen miles out to sea, shares a similar design with other Outer Banks towers built in later decades, including Currituck Beach. When North Carolina left the Union in eighteen sixty-one, Confederate authorities removed its lens to keep federal ships from navigating the coast. Union forces retook the area within a couple of years and installed a temporary lens, though the original first order lens was not restored until after the war ended, in eighteen sixty-seven. The distinctive black-and-white diamond daymark pattern painted on the tower today makes it instantly recognizable, a working lighthouse now managed by the National Park Service as part of Cape Lookout National Seashore.