St. Michaels Map and History

© John Norton

On the broad Miles River, with its picturesque tree-lined streets and beautiful harbor, St. Michaels has been a haven for boats plying the Chesapeake and its inlets since the earliest days. Here, some of the handsomest models of the Bay craft, such as canoes, bugeyes, pungys and some famous Baltimore Clippers, were designed and built. The Church, named “St. Michael’s,” was the first building erected (about 1677) and around it clustered the town that took its name.

For a walking tour and more history of the St. Michaels area visit https://tidewatertimes.com/travel-tourism/st-michaels-maryland/.

shore after chronic erosion proved land-based stations impractical. Subsequently, lightships and cottages atop sleeve- or screw-type piles proved vulnerable to ice. In severe winters, alternate freezing and thawing shaped wind-driven ice floes into massive bergs. Wind and tide battered pilings with these mounds, loosening cottages from their bases. The first Hooper Straits Lighthouse of 1867, a cottage erected on wooden pilings sleeved with cast iron, lasted only 10 years.

In 1877, lightkeeper John Cornwell and assistant Alexander Conway escaped onto the ice from their cottage at the last moment, dragging a station boat to shelter and save them from frigid water between floes. After a day and night of exposure, they were sighted by a Captain Murphy of Billys Island, who brought them ashore, badly frostbitten, to his home off Bloodsworth Island. Icebound there on tiny Billys Island, the pair recuperated far from any means of communication.

Two days after the parting, dawn revealed their lighthouse off Dorchester County, five miles from its pilings, settled to its roofline. Alerted by citizens, the lighthouse service dispatched two steamers, whose crewmen were disappointed not to find the keepers safe inside. They salvaged lens, lantern, fog bell and other materials, but the fate of the lightkeepers remained a mystery for two weeks, until thawing conditions allowed Cornwell to relay word of their rescue.

Keeper Cornwell explained in his report how he had duly completed his last quarterly report for 1876, but it had been lost with the lighthouse. He added that they were safe and “should there be another house erected, or a boat placed in the site of the old one, Conway and myself will be ready to take charge of it.” He indeed took charge in 1879, when it was replaced with a second lighthouse using screw-pile design, wrought iron pilings screwed rather than driven into the bay floor. Nevertheless, as quoted in Jane Ward’s history of the light, the station log recorded January 29, 1912, “Ice very strong, shakes house so bad put out light…5 PM, running very strong… can’t hardly keep on your feet.”

The lighthouse service eliminated such danger by adopting pneumatically constructed Sparkplugs. Coastguardsman Burton Whaley served on the Sparkplug Hooper Island Light in the early 1950s, 70 years before its auction. He told students of South Dorchester High School in an interview, “The only way that they’d ever move this lighthouse would be to blast it or dynamite it. Because I’ve been on it in the winter time….Sometimes the ice coming down the Bay would be twelve to twenty-four inches thick and large sheets of it, miles wide, would hit the lighthouse and never

Lower portion of caisson begin towed to site. The top tier of the foundation flares out like a trumpet

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Apparently crewman Burton felt secure enough that eerie groans and crackles emitted by ice plates didn’t bother him. He minded warming weather more. Quoted in the school publication Skipjack, Burton said, “The worst times on the lighthouse were in the spring. The fog horn… would blast every so many seconds and if you were trying to sleep, every time this fog horn went off, you practically came out of the bed. Sometimes the fog would set in for weeks ~ not just days ~ weeks at a time. When it did this, we would often go ashore to pick up a few supplies, merely to get away from the sound of the fog horn.”

To escape blasts sounding seconds apart, two of the light’s three crewmen would lower the station’s boat and risk a three-and-a-half mile trip in dense fog. According to Whaley, not being native to the area, it took two “to figure the wind, the waves, and everything else to actually get to the point where we would go into Hooper’s Island.”

Crews of that steadfast Sparkplug had been blessed with some diversion since 1925, when a wealthy New York woman sent a dozen radios to the Bay region to help relieve lightkeepers’ loneliness. By the early 1950s, young Burton Whaley craved more amusement than a ra-

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St. Michaels Inn offers our guests outstanding amenities to enhance your Maryland coastal retreat or business trip. Start your day off with complimentary continental breakfast, then enjoy time on the patio.

St. Michaels Inn

1228 S. Talbot Street, Saint Michaels, Maryland 21663 410-745-3333 • reservations@stmichaels-inn.com www.stmichaels-inn.com