When the Old Cape Henry lighthouse doorway’s sandstone blocks were in need of replacement, experts didn’t turn to new materials. Instead, they managed to find stone from the same 1774 shipment as the original stones!
Earlier this year, when Preservation Virginia undertook repair to the cracked eighteenth-century Aquia sandstone door lintel (overhead support) of the original Cape Henry Lighthouse, they were able to use undamaged stone blocks from a Rappahannock River quarry. The story behind this stroke of luck goes back to colonial construction in the early 1770s.
For 18th-century ship captains entering the Chesapeake Bay, there was a great need for a light beaming out from Cape Henry. It was a busy stretch of Bay, since the Virginia and Maryland colonies traded extensively with Europe. But the colonies had to find a way to pay for a new lighthouse.
In the early 1770s, the colonies placed a duty on incoming ships to finance construction near the site of the Jamestown settlers’ first landing in the New World. In 1774, they ordered 6,000 tons of Aquia sandstone, named for the creek on the tidal Potomac in Stafford County, Virginia, where it was quarried. The sandstone for Cape Henry, however, came from another quarry on a bend in the Rappahannock a few miles below Fredericksburg.
The Aquia material is called freestone, a term denoting fine grain with light color. It was popular in those days not only because the masons could carve it into decorative shapes but also because the quarries’ proximity to the rivers allowed for relatively easy shipping. Aquia stone also appears in period great houses on the Potomac and Rappahannock like Mount Vernon, Gunston Hall, and Mount Airy.
With the stone delivered to Cape Henry, the lighthouse’s building crew excavated the site’s dune and laid the stone for the foundation. But the American Revolution interrupted construction for 15 years. During the years-long delay, shifting sand dunes deeply covered leftover blocks of stone.
When the new United States began to lay out a coastal lighthouse system in 1789, the first one authorized by George Washington was Cape Henry (making it America’s first lighthouse). By then, it was easier and less expensive to ship in red sandstone from New York than dig out the original blocks buried in the dunes.
After long and faithful service, the original Cape Henry Lighthouse was decommissioned and replaced by a second light in 1881, located 350’ from it and known as the New Cape Henry Lighthouse. Preservation Virginia acquired the original light (today known as the Old Cape Henry Lighthouse) in 1930. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. Preservation Virginia has maintained it ever since, opening it to visitors for tours on fixed schedules.
When the structure around the entrance door cracked from long exposure to coastal wind and weather, voila! The shifting dune revealed more of the 235-year-old original stone. Masons from the Dominion Traditional Building Group used some of it to make the repair. There’s even more left for further repairs when needed. Historic restoration doesn’t get much better than that.
Editor’s Note: this isn’t the first restoration involving sandstone that the Old Cape Henry Lighthouse has undergone. In 2018, the Aquia sandstone around the lighthouse base had to be stabilized with retaining walls and a concrete slab. The soft sandstone was sitting atop an eroding dune, so the dune was built back up to protect the structure.
