The Currituck Beach Lighthouse in Corolla is holding up remarkably well to be turning 151 in December, but the 162-foot-tall brick tower is showing its age.

To preserve the structure, the organization responsible, Outer Banks Conservationists, or OBC, has invested in a $1 million restoration that’s currently underway.

The work should be finished soon.

“We think by the end of October,” Meghan Agresto, lighthouse keeper told Coastal Review. “But of course, many lighthouse things are weather-dependent.”

OBC, the Manteo-based nonprofit organization that owns and operates the historic lighthouse, is having the work done near the top of the tower, where there are two rows of scaffolding with orange weatherproof sheeting that protects the workers and the work. The lantern room housing the focal plane is clearly visible.

“A crew of five masons and metalworkers who will repoint the exterior brickwork on the tower using natural hydraulic lime with a color to match the original, rehabilitate the historic gallery door, railings, and underside of the lantern deck,” Agresto said.

ICC Commonwealth, the same New York-based company that relocated the Hatteras Lighthouse in 1999, is doing the work.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was at the time threatened by years of erosion, so the 1870 structure was relocated 2,900 feet to the south to save it. The lighthouse, within Cape Hatteras National Seashore and managed by the National Park Service, is also undergoing restoration but that is a major, multiyear project.

After mentioning repointing the bricks – the process of removing crumbling mortar and replacing it — Agresto clarified that, unlike the Hatteras Lighthouse project where the brick has to be repointed and repainted, the red masonry exterior of Currituck Beach does not require paint.

In the 1870s when the Currituck Lighthouse was built, the metal that was used was iron and “rust mitigation is cyclical, so … we get that done every five to seven years.”

The last rust abatement was done between 2020 and 2021, and during that period, significant additional restoration was completed, including “crack repair on the lower bands of iron, and (we) replaced the cornice pieces on the roof, worked on rust around our tower windows, and stabilized the wood in those five windows,” said Agresto.

The current project is building on the work that was done six years ago.

In addition to the exterior work on the brick and metal, the gallery door inside the tower is being rehabilitated “by removing rust with needle scaling, and restabilizing afterwards,” Agresto said.

The gallery door that leads to the watch room is distinctive, the conservation group notes on their website, because the “Lighthouse may be the only one of its kind that still has the option to double-close a door to either the watch room or the outdoor gallery.”

The ongoing work is meticulous. For example, the tower’s lantern deck has what Agresto described as “unique sunburst prisms, which allowed light from the oil-burning lamp to also illuminate the interior.” Any prisms that cannot be saved, they will be swapped out with reproductions that bear marks to denote that they are replacements.

But the work is in the manner of past, cyclical rehabilitation projects, Agresto said, that “will ensure the lighthouse will remain structurally sound, historically accurate, and will continue sharing its sense of place and awe for future generations.”

Unlike the Hatteras renovation, work on the Currituck Beach Lighthouse is more routine, a periodic process that does not rely upon multimillion-dollar government grants, Agresto explained.

“Funding for big projects comes directly from our visitors, rather than from federal appropriations, which makes it possible for us to keep pace with cyclical maintenance instead of allowing needs to accumulate over decades,” she explained.

She also pointed out that the model for maintaining the lighthouse is close to the way it was originally done. She and her husband, Luis, live at the site, much like the original lighthouse keepers did.

“True to the station’s historic operation (we) live and breathe the lighthouse’s operation, maintenance, and preservation,” Agresto said.

The Currituck Beach Lighthouse was the last lighthouse built on the Outer Banks. Placed between the Cape Henry in Virginia and Bodie Island at Oregon Inlet, it illuminated the final stretch of dark, treacherous coastline along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Invented in 1822 by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, the Fresnel lens’ concentric prism rings focus the light from flame in the Currituck Light’s lantern room. Rated by the power of the lens to transmit light, the first-order Fresnel lens was the most powerful available.

When the Currituck Beach Light first shone on Dec. 15, 1875, the press took note. The Wilmington Morning Star reported on the front page of its Dec. 21, 1875, edition that “All masters of vessels trading between this port and the North of Europe or the Northern ports of our own country will realize the benefit of this most important aid to commerce. In a period of less than twenty-two years from 1852 to 1874, no less than fifty-six vessels went ashore on Currituck beach, many of them being totally lost.”

Just three years after the lighthouse became operational, one of the most horrific shipwrecks occurred along the Outer Banks. The three-masted steamer Metropolis ran aground on Jan. 31, 1878. Of the 248 passengers and crew aboard the ship, 85 were lost. The U.S. Life-saving Service, a predecessor of the Coast Guard, was excoriated in the national press for the loss of life, but the ship itself was unseaworthy when it left Philadelphia, bound for Brazil.

Despite that loss, the lighthouse had served its purpose. Placed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, a North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources report written in 1999, claimed the lighthouse helped save lives.

“In spite of the resulting public outcry that the lifesaving station’s inefficiency doomed the Metropolis’ passengers, it can be argued that the lighthouse had done its job; had the ship’s captain not seen Currituck Beach Lighthouse in the distance and realized heading toward shore was his best option, probably all lives on board would have been lost,” the authors wrote.