New England Lighthouse Treasures

Bodie Island Lighthouse will be reopened to partial Public Tours on Tuesday, July 31, 2007. The Lighthouse has been closed to visitors since August 9, 2004 after large pieces of cast iron fell from the balcony and the window of the Lantern Room. A recently completed emergency restoration project wrapped cables around corroding pieces of metal on the balcony.

Visitors will be able walk inside and view the winding staircase from 10am to 2pm every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Bodie Island Lighthouse will not be opened to climb the 214 steps to the Lantern Room. A restoration project is scheduled for 2008 estimated to cost $3.4 million.

Bodie Island Lighthouse was the third Lighthouse built in the vicinity of Nags Head and Oregon Inlet, North Carolina to improve marking the dangerous outer banks by constructing a Lighthouse between Cape Henry, Virginia and Cape Hatteras Light in North Carolina.

Bodie Island Light was First Lit on October 1, 1872 exhibiting a Fixed White Light illuminated by a First-order Fresnel lens and Lard oil Lamp 156-feet above sea level visible to a range of 18 nautical miles. The light was converted from a fixed to a flashing light when the lighting apparatus was converted to electricity on Sep 19, 1932. The current Light Characteristic is 2 White Flashes every 30-seconds (Flash pattern: 2.5-seconds Flash, 2.5 second eclipse, 2.5 seconds Flash, 22.5 seconds eclipse).

On July 13, 2000, the Tower of Bodie Island Lighthouse was transferred from the U.S. Coast Guard to the National Park Service for preserving the historic landmark. In 2003, the Coast Guard planned to remove and replace the deteriorating Fresnel lens with a modern optic. Fortunately, the National Park Service negotiated a plan to save the historic lens and the U.S. Coast Guard transferred ownership of the Fresnel lens to the National Park Service under the General Services Administration’s federal property disposal process on April 25, 2005.

The First-order Fresnel lens requires complete restoration of the deteriorating brass framework which secures the gleaming glass prisms and rotating lens in place.

For more information about Public Tours, please visit Bodie Island Light.

For Map Directions, please visit the Google Map of Bodie Island Lighthouse.

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This entry was authored and posted by Debbie Dolphin on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Open House. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Comments may be held for moderation, and I reserve the right to delete inappropriate or off-topic comments.