Craighill Keeper’s bLog

All hail a regular sleep schedule again! Ok, I am, at least. The deadline for the Maryland Lighthouses book in the Images of America series was due first thing yesterday morning, so I stayed up all night the night before putting what I thought were the finishing touches on, which ended up being far more time-consuming than I expected! So I revised the text manuscript and resent it this morning feeling much better about it. Stay tuned on publication! I still have to go through the proof stage.

I began feeling like completing the book was going to kill me - at least trying to juggle it and work and run the Craighill efforts all at the same time. I am really glad I did it, though. I now feel rather knowledgeable about the history of all Maryland lighthouses, no longer caught up in the myopic world of the one I deal with on a regular basis. I also have the geography of the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay firmly seared into my brain and will hopefully never get lost. Heh.

I made some interesting observations during the research portion that I wasn’t sure how to deal with and I wanted my facts to be accurate, so ended up being vague in some portions. For example, the Bloody Point Bar explosion - the wires from the tender to headquarters spelled one of the Guardsmen’s names as Mitchell. All newspaper clippings spelled it Mighall. Now, I know newspapers are notorious for misspelling names, so when I ran across the first one, I figured they got it wrong and planned on sticking with ‘Mitchell’. Then I ran across another article, and another using ‘Mighall’. How can three newspapers spell it wrong? Did one take the spelling from another? I doubt it - they have to ask people how to spell the name, right? So I just said, “two young Coast Guardsmen barely escaped before the explosion when their launch didn’t float freely..” or something to that effect.

Point Lookout’s keeper Ann Davis was listed some places as taking over after her husband’s death and others after her father’s death. So I just gave her name, but not relation.

The other difficulty I had was explaining how caissons were built in plain layman terms, particularly since there were two methods - sinking by weight and the pneumatic method where a pump was used and men dug from a working chamber. Remember, I was using images along with the text and had no images for the early caisson construction. The National Archives had slews of images from the construction of Point No Point and Holland Island (both, I believe, using the pneumatic method). So I hope it’s accurate and makes sense. I read engineering encyclopedias to help myself get a grasp on the process. It was like putting a puzzle together because none of the images at the National Archives had captions or were in any particular order, so I had to try to sort them out and determine which phase of construction they were showing, complicated by the fact that Point No Point’s caisson was lost down the bay and had to be retowed and set and I didn’t know if the photos were from before or after that happened. Fun stuff! (hmm.. and now that I think about it, I think I forgot to mention that tidbit in the book! Darn word count restrictions!)

I wish I had made it to the Naval Academy library and the Maryland State Archives (ordered some images online). I still plan on making trips there at some point because I want to collect as many Craighill images as I can and frankly, there weren’t many at the Archives or the Coast Guard Historian’s Office.

So anyway, I have all these digital historic images and plan on putting them online at some point. In order to write the book and thread all the histories together, I built myself a website on my laptop so I could click a lighthouse name and see what images I had for it and its status (active, standing but not active, no longer standing, relocated) and architectural type. I also took notes of interest and transcribed newspaper clippings when I ran across something I wanted to remember. Some of the text documents from the USCG files are also transcribed. I think it would make a great (but far from complete) resource for people wanting to know more or see historic images, particularly of the many lighthouses that no longer exist (man, you should see the Brewerton Channel Range Lights! Gorgeous!) so I plan on putting it up some time soon. I need to clean it up and reprogram some of it for a live website instead of locally first. Digital library! That’s the phrase of the day.

Okay, here’s a teaser! Leading Point - aka Brewerton Channel Rear Range Light