The Oldest Lighthouse on the Potomac River
44720 Lighthouse Road, Piney Point, MD 20674
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Modest admission to the lighthouse museum and grounds. Check St. Mary's County Recreation and Parks for current rates and seasonal hours.
Access
Limited Access
Paved paths around the grounds; the lighthouse tower itself involves narrow historic stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1836 · Oldest Lighthouse on the Potomac · John Donahoo Construction · National Register of Historic Places · U-1105 Black Panther Shipwreck Site · NPS Chesapeake Gateways Network
A lightship had marked the shoals at Piney Point and Ragged Point on the opposite Potomac shore since 1821. In March 1835 Congress appropriated five thousand dollars for a permanent light, and in late December of that year St. Mary's County conveyed 2.6 acres of land from Henry Suter to the federal government for three hundred dollars.
The lighthouse was completed in 1836 by John Donahoo, an Irish-born builder responsible for many of the early Chesapeake Bay lights. The thirty-foot brick tower stood beside a keeper's dwelling that sat directly on the riverbank. For more than a century the station guided merchant traffic and recreational vessels along the lower Potomac.
The Coast Guard decommissioned the light in 1964. The structure suffered from neglect and erosion until 1990, when the Museum Division of St. Mary's County Department of Recreation and Parks began a serious preservation campaign. Restoration of the tower and renovation of the outbuildings have continued since.
The museum park today preserves the 1836 light, an interpretive exhibit on Chesapeake maritime history, and a permanent display about the U-1105 Black Panther, a WWII German submarine captured at the end of the war and ultimately scuttled offshore. The wreck site became Maryland's first Historic Shipwreck Dive Preserve. The lighthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a partner site within the National Park Service's Chesapeake Gateways network.
Sources
Piney Point's reputation as a reportedly active site is local and modest. Visitors to the keeper's dwelling have described unseen brushing or tapping sensations along their arms and shoulders, particularly in the upper rooms. A handful of accounts describe a woman in light 1920s-era dress glimpsed near the tower or along the path to the dock, who vanishes when approached.
The lighthouse does not center its programming on the paranormal; its primary interpretation focuses on Chesapeake maritime history, the keepers who lived there, and the U-1105 submarine offshore. The folklore element is best understood as one strand among many in a layered museum experience.
Tour the 1836 lighthouse and its associated keeper's quarters along the Potomac River. The grounds also include the U-1105 Black Panther shipwreck exhibit, documenting the captured WWII German submarine that lies offshore in Maryland's first Historic Shipwreck Dive Preserve. The site is part of the NPS Chesapeake Gateways network and the National Register of Historic Places.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Solomons, MD
Drum Point Lighthouse is one of three surviving Chesapeake Bay screwpile lighthouses, originally commissioned in 1883 at the mouth of the Patuxent River, Maryland. The hexagonal cottage-type light was decommissioned in 1962 and moved 2 nautical miles upriver to the Calvert Marine Museum in 1975, where it was restored and reopened to the public in 1978.
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.
St. Simons Island, GA
The St. Simons Lighthouse is Georgia's oldest continuously operating lighthouse. Built in 1872 to replace a Civil War-era predecessor destroyed by retreating Confederate troops, it has guided ships into the Brunswick channel for more than 150 years. In 1880, head keeper Frederick Osborne was shot by his assistant John Stevens after a personal dispute.