1883 Screwpile Light at the Calvert Marine Museum
14200 Solomons Island Road, Solomons, MD 20688
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Museum admission includes lighthouse access; typical adult rate $9-12. Tickets at the museum gate.
Access
Limited Access
Restored screwpile lighthouse with stairs to the upper level; museum grounds are accessible
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1883 · Chesapeake Bay Screwpile Lighthouse · U.S. Lighthouse Board · National Register of Historic Places · Maritime Preservation
The U.S. Lighthouse Board commissioned the Drum Point Lighthouse in 1883 at the mouth of the Patuxent River, where it enters the Chesapeake Bay near the southern tip of Calvert County, Maryland. The first lighthouse keeper, Benjamin Gray, lit the lamp on August 20, 1883. Discussions to establish a navigation aid at Drum Point had begun in 1838 with a report by Lt. William D. Porter, but disputes between the state of Maryland and the federal government over the cession of state water-bottom land delayed construction for forty-five years.
Drum Point is a screwpile cottage-type lighthouse: a hexagonal wooden keeper's residence supported by iron piles screwed into the soft bottom of the Chesapeake. The first floor contained four rooms wrapped by an open gallery, with two rooms in the second floor under a hexagonal roof lit by dormer windows, and the lantern cupola at the top originally housed a fourth-order Fresnel lens. The form was efficient on a sandy bay bottom that could not support stone-tower construction.
Forty-five screwpile lighthouses once served the Chesapeake Bay at the beginning of the twentieth century; only three survive intact today. Drum Point was decommissioned in 1962 and sat abandoned for over a decade, increasingly vandalized. In 1975, a $25,000 grant from the State of Maryland funded the contract to move the lighthouse, intact, two nautical miles upriver to its current location adjacent to the Calvert Marine Museum, which had opened in 1970. The lighthouse was restored to a turn-of-the-twentieth-century keeper's-quarters appearance and reopened to the public on June 24, 1978. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is among the most-visited features of the Calvert Marine Museum.
Sources
Drum Point Lighthouse carries a quieter and less heavily marketed paranormal tradition than most surviving lighthouses on the Chesapeake. Museum staff and visitors describe a felt presence in the keeper's quarters, occasional footsteps on the upper-floor staircase when the building is empty, and reports of a female figure with dark hair glimpsed from the gallery porch or from the museum grounds.
No specific historical identification is widely accepted for the reported presence. The lighthouse's eight keepers from 1883 to 1962 are documented, but the figure described in modern accounts has not been firmly tied to any specific keeper's family member. The Calvert Marine Museum does not promote the lighthouse as a paranormal destination; the lore appears in regional Chesapeake folklore compendia and on chesapeakebay.net.
Tour the restored 1883 Drum Point Lighthouse along with the broader Calvert Marine Museum, which interprets Chesapeake Bay maritime history, paleontology, and estuarine ecology. The lighthouse is furnished to a turn-of-the-twentieth-century keeper's-quarters appearance.
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Baltimore, MD
Built in 1855 at the mouth of the Patapsco River, Seven Foot Knoll Light is the oldest screwpile lighthouse in Maryland and the first ever built in the state. The cast-iron structure was relocated in 1988 to Pier 5 of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, where it now operates as a public museum.
Scotland, MD
Point Lookout Lighthouse, built by John Donahoo in 1830, marks the cape where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. During the Civil War the cape served as a Union hospital and Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, where nearly four thousand prisoners died and were buried on the grounds.
Piney Point, MD
Piney Point Lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse on the Potomac River, built by John Donahoo in 1836 to warn vessels of the shoals at Piney Point and Ragged Point. Decommissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1964, it is now a museum operated by St. Mary's County and a stop on the NPS Chesapeake Gateways network.