History
Benjamin Latrobe submitted drawings for these lights before his death in 1820, but the range was not erected until 1822. Both houses stood in shallow water off North Point, with footbridges connecting them to the shore. A single keeper served both lights, and he was paid nearly double the usual amount for his services. The construction of the lights was apparently substandard, and in 1830 John Donahoo was called upon to repair and shore them up.
When they were constructed, no ship channel had yet been dredged in the Patapsco, though some dredging had been performed in the Inner Harbor area. In the 1850s the Brewerton Channel was constructed, but it headed straight out of the harbor to the mouth of the river. Therefore the range lights never marked a specific channel. Complaints about the visibility and usefulness of the lights were common.
In the 1870s the construction of the main Craighill Channel made the lights obsolete, since it ran in a different direction and had its own range lights. Therefore the North Point lights were abandoned in 1873. When the Craighill Channel Cutoff was constructed in the 1880s, it was initially planned to adapt the North Point west light as the front light for a range for the new channel. The old light proved unsatisfactory, however, and it was torn down; its foundation was preserved and used for the new Craighill Channel Upper Range Front Light. The new rear light was placed at a completely different location on Sparrows Point. The foundation of the east light remains, charted as an obstruction but otherwise unmarked.
Read more about this topic: North Point Range Lights
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)