Located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, This tower stands 161 feet high and had a first order lens. The keeper's dwelling as well as the rest of the island has been claimed by erosion and the tower itself is now surrounded by water.

Morris Island Lighthouse just before sunset. As seen from the north end of Folly Beach.

The first glimpse of the Lighthouse from the end of the road

 

This light served until 1962 when the new Charleston Lighthouse on Sullivan's Island was put into service. According to local legend, Fred Wichmann, local son of a Lighthouse keeper, with the assistance of L. Mendel Rivers, stopped it's destruction when a Savannah wrecking firm made a bid on it to salvage the bricks. It was also owned by F. E. Felkel, a private developer, then the State of South Carolina, and now is in private hands once again.

 

The old tower that has survived hurricanes and a major earthquake, is probably not going to be saved. Strong currents have undermined the foundation, and the tower is listing about 5 degrees. Go see it now before it's gone.

From letters Hains wrote 128 years ago, historians know he designed the lighthouse, an engineering marvel that has survived earthquakes, hurricanes and countless storms.

And since the early 1940s, when the ocean washed away the island upon which the lighthouse once sat, the historic structure stranded in the sea off Folly Beach has been relentlessly pounded by ocean waves.

Historians and engineers now hope to find out not only how the lighthouse survived, but how many more years it will stand before toppling into the sea.

What they know is that a Union hero built the lighthouse, but it was a Union general who unintentionally unleashed the natural forces that ravage it to this day.

"It's a story of discovery," said historian Doug Bostic, director of Save the Light, the nonprofit citizens' group dedicated to saving the lighthouse. "We're trying to find out what happened in the 1870s and what's happened in the last 100 years."

This week, modern engineers are drilling into the foundation of the lighthouse to explore the condition of the timber pilings that support it.

Their worst fear: worms.

Shipworms, actually small clams with big mouths, bore into wood, entering with tiny holes that become bigger inside as the clam grows from the wood it eats.

The base of the lighthouse is 10 feet under water at high tide, and these so-called termites of the sea may have worked their way into the pilings.

But how many pilings support the lighthouse? How are they arranged, and how much weight does each support?

For answers, engineers turned to Hains.

Outside his letters, he remains mostly a mystery.

Bostic said Hains was from Pennsylvania and earned medals for valor at the 1862 Battle of Hanover Church in Virginia and during the siege of Vicksburg.

Like many West Point graduates, Hains joined the federal Army Corps of Engineers after the war and was commissioned to build a new lighthouse on the site of an earlier one on Morris Island.

Confederate soldiers destroyed the original lighthouse, fearing the Union Army would climb it to observe their positions on Morris Island. So Union soldiers stood on the rubble to get a glimpse of their enemy.

In his letters, Hains described in vivid detail the challenges of building a 3,200-ton, 158-foot-high lighthouse on the site, a sandy spit of land at the entrance to Charleston Harbor.

The soil is "very soft to a considerable depth, utterly wanting in bearing capacity for such a structure as a light-house tower," Hains wrote his superiors in Washington.

Hains proposed to drive 264 pilings of yellow pine into the sand and soft clay, then cap the pilings with a cross-hatch of 12-inch beams. On that, he would lay a base of portland cement mixed with bricks and rocks from the rubble of the earlier lighthouse.

At one point near construction, the federal government apparently proposed withdrawing funding.

Hains objected, arguing the importance of the lighthouse in guiding the many ships that had made Charleston a busy port in the cotton trade.

Work was twice halted during the summer "sickly season." But by 1876, the lighthouse was finished.

Ten years later, Charleston was rocked by an earthquake that damaged or destroyed many of the city's historic churches.

The tremors cracked the lighthouse, tipping it slightly toward the sea.

Because of the change in angle, the light that ship captains had been able to see 19 miles out to sea could only be seen when they were closer to shore.

Thinking they were farther out than they actually were, captains ran their ships aground on the treacherous shoals at the entrance to Charleston Harbor.

Even before the lighthouse was built, Charleston businessmen had asked the federal government to deepen the shallow entrance to the harbor.

The federal corps commissioned Quincy Gillmore, the Union general who had commanded the siege of Charleston, to design jetties to scour and deepen a channel into the harbor.

Soon after Gillmore's 2-mile-long jetties were built, rechanneled ocean tides and waves began to wash out chunks of nearby Morris Island, which Gillmore had attacked during the war.

"What he failed to take as a general, he later destroyed as an engineer," Bostic said.

By the early 1940s, the ocean had severed the lighthouse from the rest of Morris Island, and the caretaker's house was removed. A decade later, the lighthouse was stranded in the sea.

To protect the lighthouse from erosion, the corps built a steel bulkhead around the light and filled it with cement.

But in 1962, the light in a new triangular-shaped lighthouse on Sullivan's Island was turned on, and Morris Island Lighthouse was abandoned. Three years later, it was sold to the highest bidder.

After three decades of private ownership and neglect, Save the Light purchased the lighthouse for $75,000 and turned it over to the state. The state leased it back to Save the Light, which has mounted a campaign to raise millions of dollars in public and private money to restore the lighthouse.

Until the engineering surveys are complete, the full cost of the restoration won't be known.

The bulkhead built by the corps 60 years ago is now a rusted, jagged hulk sticking out of the ocean at low tide. The cement inside has long since sloughed off into the sea.

If the lighthouse's pilings are in good condition, it could arguably survive another 100 years, perhaps with another coffer dam and protective rocks placed around it.

But an earlier, albeit cursory, study suggested that timbers in the grillwork and pilings nearest the ocean are deteriorated.

If the foundation shows evidence of giving way, the lighthouse could be lifted and placed on a new foundation.

Or it could be moved, though it's not clear where. Sandy shoals shift daily in the dynamic inlet where the lighthouse stands.

Morris Island, 1,600 feet away, is no more than a beach and marsh. A 30-foot-deep, rushing channel separates the lighthouse from the tip of Folly Beach.

While it will likely cost millions to restore the lighthouse, it's too important a monument of the city's maritime history not to, said Robert New, co-chairman of Save the Light.

"It's part of our history. It's part of our culture. It's part of the soul of this community. And it should be a part of our future," New said.

The lighthouse's future now rests on the 264 pilings Hains designed.

With his meticulous description of his work as their guide, engineers hired by Save the Light are drilling into the barnacle-covered foundation of the lighthouse in search for the original yellow-pine pilings.

The engineers from International Chimney of Buffalo, N.Y. - the same company that moved the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina - clung to the steep, slippery and wave-washed steps.

A missed step and fall off the rocks into the water below could cause serious injury, if not worse.

As the ocean surf washed against him, chief core driller Mike Vacanti guided a diamond-tipped iron cylinder into the cement base of the lighthouse.

After several attempts to push the drill deeper, a burning, pungent odor escaped from the hole. Vacanti hit wood, covered with what appeared to be a primitive creosote.

He pulled out the cylinder and tapped out the wood inside. It was a piece of piling.

No worms.

Arlie Porter covers Charleston County. Contact him at 937-5548 or porter@postandcourier.com

Copyright © 2001 Charleston.Net. All Rights Reserved.