Craighill Keeper’s bLog

Remember when we took a Chesapeake Bay Magazine journalist and photographer out to Craighill for a day? The feature article is finally available in the May issue - which has already gone out to subscribers, but doesn’t appear to be available yet for newsstand purchase. Soon! Author Marty LeGrand’s piece about local lighthouses and the challenges and successes of off-shore ownership paints a fantastic picture. The photographs by Tamzin Smith accentuate and enhance the tales, particularly the images showing how difficult it is to access our little caisson in the Bay. Don’t miss this issue!

I’m heading out to Thomas Point tomorrow for a day of bird poop scraping and sweeping. Always fun! I look forward to getting out to Craighill soon to check on it after the winter and do the same endless task of bird poop cleaning. We’re also working out resolving the difficult access issues so we can get volunteer crews out over the next couple months for lead abatement and painting. Stay tuned!

If you’re in or near DC, I’ll also be selling books and doing a book signing at Argia’s restaurant in Falls Church next Sunday, April 27th. Come on by!

If you purchase the book through the link below, I’ll even autograph your copy! Plus, this means more proceeds from the book will go directly into the lighthouse restoration (and make-it-safe) fund! Total cost is $25 with shipping. Thanks!! I hope you enjoy it! I really worked hard to dig up some photos that weren’t found in other books. It’s almost lighthouse/boating season! We should start ramping up posts and updates here soon.

In Colonial times, as the Chesapeake Bay and larger rivers became vital shipping channels, the need arose to mark Maryland’s dangerous shoals and waterways. Lighthouses sprang up throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, including wood-framed cottages placed upon screw pile foundations that stood offshore in the unforgiving waters. Most of these unique structures did not survive, lost tragically to ice that also occasionally claimed the lives of the keepers who faithfully tended them and rescued mariners in trouble. With the advent of electricity and GPS, many beacons succumbed to vandalism and neglect, leaving a fraction remaining.

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

In order to help better organize myself while writing captions to historic Maryland lighthouse images collected at the US Coast Guard Historian’s Office and the National Archives (and I’m open to more if anyone has them!), I created a Google Map of all Maryland Lighthouses. I’m a visual and hands-on kind of person. I tried to tag them all by their status, but I got tired with a deadline looming and got a little lazy toward the end, so some yellows are still active aids to navigation, but not the original historic structure that once stood there. Someday, I’ll probably go back through and add another “color” tag to denote ones that were replaced with skeleton structures. Anyway, I thought others might find this useful as well. Some locations are approximate.

View Larger Map

Over the last several years, I’ve become an avid amateur photographer. I use a Mac laptop and heavily utilized iPhoto as my “organizer”, but the editing capabilities were slim. I then had to purchase a little software gadget called “iPhoto Library Manager” because I filled up my hard drive and had no way to archive photos off and still be able to open them in the iPhoto library (which kept the organization structure). This software allowed me to have multiple iPhoto libraries, so I could have one for baseball, one for lighthouses, one for family trips, etc. and store them on an external firewire drive. Still, I found tagging photos with keywords arduous and a task often ignored. So my photo library became quite a mess as the years went on. My workflow consisted of offloading a card into the local iPhoto on my laptop and creating an album, then at some later date (usually when the hard drive was threatening to fill again), I would copy the album to a library on the external drive and then go through and delete the original photos on the hard drive. Time-consuming and not fun.

Then my mom (a 35mm photographer who is just entering the digital world) suggested I start shooting in RAW mode after being shown all the capabilities. That was fine and good, but I had to use a converter for my Canon’s CR2 RAW files before I could then use the photos in Photoshop. Blah - again, too much.

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