PINEY POINT LIGHTHOUSE-PINEY POINT, MARYLAND

                                                                                                                      Piney Point Lighthouse in 1912
                                                                                                             Photograph courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard

Located fourteen miles up the Potomac River from the Chesapeake Bay, Piney Point Lighthouse is situated on the Maryland shore of the river. A lightship had been stationed in the area since 1821 to mark hazardous shoals at Piney Point and at Ragged Point on the opposite shore. In 1835, Congress set aside $5,000 for construction of a land-based beacon to replace the lightship, and the contract was awarded to the prolific lighthouse builder John Donahoo. Piney Point Lighthouse was the tenth of twelve he would complete in his lifetime. 
First lit in September 1836, Piney Point Lighthouse is much like most of Donahoo’s other towers – a thick and blocky structure in the form of a truncated cone. The tower has a thirteen-foot diameter at the base, where its walls are four-feet thick, and tapers to a seven-foot diameter at the top, where the walls are only eighteen inches thick. The door to the structure is just five feet high, and is set in a threshold that is a single piece of stone. Donahoo’s works were cheap and sturdy, allowing him to make low bids that were to the liking of the frugal Fifth Auditor of the Treasury, Stephen Pleasanton. Since Pleasanton held great sway over lighthouse construction for three decades, John Donahoo’s building style was repeatedly endorsed.
Twenty-six-foot-tall Piney Point originally employed ten lamps, set in spherical reflectors, to produce a fixed white light. In addition to the tower, Donahoo built a three-room, one-story keeper’s dwelling topped by an A-line roof. The small twenty by thirty-foot house contained a dining room, parlor, fireplace, and cellar, and had an attached ten by twelve-foot kitchen. In 1884, a second story was added to the structure, greatly improving the keeper’s comfort level.
On June 5, 1855, the old lighting apparatus of ten oil lamps and fifteen-inch reflectors was replaced by a more efficient fifth-order Fresnel lens, increasing the lighthouse’s visibility from ten to eleven miles. In March 1880, a thirty-foot, wooden fog bell tower, built in the Victorian style, was added to the station to aid mariners in low-visibility conditions. Painted white, this tower stood fifteen feet west of the lighthouse and possessed a mechanical striker that tolled the bell every twenty seconds during thick and foggy weather. A  long reed horn replaced the bell in 1936. The old bell tower was torn down after being heavily damaged by Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
The keeper’s job was ultimately eliminated with the onset of automation, and Piney Point Light Station was decommissioned completely in 1964. For many years the Coast Guard kept the property as housing for its personnel, but in 1980 it deeded the grounds to St. Mary’s County. The lighthouse and other buildings were given to the Department of Recreation and Parks, and this organization allowed the St. Clement’s Island-Potomac River Museum to take over operation of the site. Though the light is no longer an aid to navigation, the museum sometimes activates the light at night.