Pungoteague Creek Light
lighthouse in Virginia, United States
The Pungoteague Creek Light was a small screwpile lighthouse constructed in the Chesapeake Bay in 1854. Destroyed in 1856, it had the shortest recorded existence of any lighthouse on the Bay, and possibly the United States, at just 459 days.
The lighthouse was built just offshore from Accomack County, Virginia, and was located near the mouth of Pungoteague Creek, then called the Pungoteague River. It was the first screwpile lighthouse built on the Chesapeake, and its construction was overseen by Major Hartman Bache. Most of the foundation was prefabricated in Philadelphia, and was sent, along with the construction crew, down the Bay from Baltimore on April 23, 1854. It was originally estimated that construction of the light would take only six weeks, but lengthy calms during the voyage combined with the crew's inexperience and difficulty in sinking the piles extended the process to almost six months.
The lighthouse was finished and commissioned on November 1, 1854. A small structure, it sat on seven pneumatic piles, and was equipped with a fifth-order Fresnel lens. It was overturned by an ice floe on February 2, 1856. Nobody was injured as the lighthouse was close enough to shore to make rescue of the keeper fairly easy; the structure, though, was a complete loss.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7260174. Authority coordinates are 37.663, -75.898. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1854 and 1856.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pungoteague Creek Light” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.