Drum Point Lighthouse
Calvert County, Calvert County, Maryland
Marker Inscription
1883-1962 This lighthouse, installed in 1883, originally stood 125 yards offshore at the entrance of the Patuxent River to the Chesapeake Bay. The foundations on which the cottage living quarters rest consist of seven wrought iron screw piles, hand bored… transcription continues on the marker
This transcription may be incomplete
Our source stores marker text in a field capped at 255 characters, and this inscription appears to have been cut off. We won’t guess at the missing words — the inscription is the primary source, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it short.
Have you stood in front of this marker? Send us the full text or a photo of the sign and we’ll complete the record.
The Story
Screwpile lighthouses like this one were an ingenious answer to the soft, shifting bottoms of the Chesapeake Bay, where a traditional masonry tower could never stand. Rather than pouring a foundation, builders threaded wrought-iron piles into the muddy floor by hand and perched a hexagonal cottage atop them, so the keeper and family lived directly above the water they guarded. Installed in 1883 at the mouth of the Patuxent River, this light marked the passage into one of the bay's busiest tributaries for nearly eighty years, guiding oyster boats, steamers, and freight through the shoals until it was retired in 1962.
Why it matters
The Chesapeake's screwpile lights represent a distinctly American solution to navigating a vast inland sea, and their vanishing—most were destroyed or replaced—makes each surviving example a rare window into the maritime economy that built the region.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Chain Bridge
Arlington, VA
In 1797, the merchants of Georgetown spanned the Potomac at the Little Falls, raising the first bridge across the river in a bid to capture trade that might otherwise flow downstream to the rival Virginia port of Alexandria. The original Falls Bridge let wagons hauling goods from Virginia's "upper country" roll directly into Georgetown, knitting the young capital region's commerce together. Repeatedly destroyed by floods and rebuilt over the decades, the crossing eventually took the name "Chain Bridge" from a chain-suspension version that once stood here.
The Mouth of Pimmit Run
Arlington, VA
Where Pimmit Run empties into the Potomac at the river's head of navigation, colonial Virginia planter Thomas Lee patented land in 1719 and, in 1742, established an official tobacco inspection warehouse. In the tobacco economy of the Tidewater, such government-licensed warehouses were vital chokepoints where the colony's signature crop was graded, certified, and prepared for shipment to Britain. This riverside spot grew into what's remembered as Arlington's first industrial complex, later associated with figures like Philip Richard Fendall in the years after 1794.
Newport Mills
Chevy Chase, MD
In 1774, on the eve of the Revolution, Thomas Johns—soon to serve as a colonel in the Continental cause—joined Georgetown merchant Thomas Richardson to raise flour mills along the reliable current of Rock Creek. Grinding grain into flour for the growing capital region, mills operated on this site for roughly a century, outlasting the men who built them and falling silent only in the 1870s. In an age before steam, a dependable creek was industrial infrastructure, and Rock Creek's waters turned the stones that fed Georgetown's wharves and tables.
The Fell Family Cemetery
Baltimore, MD
In the maritime heart of Baltimore lies the small burial ground of the Fell family, the English settlers who gave their name to Fell's Point. Arriving in the eighteenth century, the Fells laid out a shipbuilding and shipping community along the deep water of the Patapsco River, and their surname still marks one of the city's oldest and most storied neighborhoods. This family plot is a quiet reminder that a bustling seafaring district began with a single household's land and ambitions.