Qualla: Hog Island Light

Hog Island Light: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement, Public domain. On Washington's Birthday in 1900, the two keepers of the Hog Island Light heard a sound like hailstones hammering the lantern room. A massive flock of geese and ducks, drawn by the beam cutting through the winter darkness, had smashed into the lighthouse glass. The keepers fired their shotguns to drive the birds away. Two days later, another flock attacked. This time the men were out of ammunition and had to fight the birds off with sticks, the lantern glass shattering around them, the light going dark over the Atlantic. It was a strange, almost biblical scene -- but on Hog Island, Virginia, the real enemy was never the birds. It was the sea itself, advancing year by year, devouring the barrier island beneath the tower's iron legs until there was nothing left to stand on.

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Image: U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement | Public domain

Hog Island Light: Sweet Potatoes and Shipwrecks

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement, Public domain. The story of the Hog Island Light begins with produce. In 1827, Captain Lewis Matthews loaded the schooner Providence with sweet potatoes at Thomas's Wharf on the Machipongo River -- the first shipment from Virginia's Eastern Shore to New York City. The wharf sat at one of the fe...

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Image: U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement | Public domain

Hog Island Light: The Iron Giant

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement, Public domain. Erosion made short work of that first tower's location. By the 1890s, the advancing shoreline threatened to undermine the brick structure, and in 1896 the government erected a replacement more than half a mile back from the ocean, in a clearing carved from the dense pine forest t...

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Image: U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement | Public domain

Hog Island Light: Storms and Vanishing Ground

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement, Public domain. The barrier island refused to stay put. The 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac hurricane damaged the light station and gouged away great swaths of shoreline. That same year brought one piece of good news: both the Hog Island and Cape Charles lights were electrified, ending the laborious rou...

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Image: U.S. Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class Eric Clement | Public domain

Hog Island Light: A Lens Without a Lighthouse

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit darlingtrk, CC BY 2.0. The village of Broadwater, which once sat near the light station, vanished beneath the waves along with the rest of Hog Island's eastern shore. Today the site where the lighthouse stood is nearly a mile out to sea. But the massive Fresnel lens survived. When the light was deactiv...

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Image: darlingtrk | CC BY 2.0