The Great Northeaster of 1913

Anglesea residents gather round a storm damaged Lighthouse, 1913 Photo courtesy of Richard Dietz, featured in Steve Murray’s book “Guardians of the Hereford Inlet”

Ferocious storms have always been one of the more serious drawbacks to living on a barrier island, three miles from the mainland. This was especially true in the early days of Anglesea when there were no weather reports or warnings, few seawalls or bulkheads and wood frame houses built without hurricane anchors, pilings and sometimes even without foundations.

Some of those storms swept the Atlantic completely across the Five Mile Beach. One account even talks of the Ocean meeting the Delaware Bay in the area of Route 47.

The Hereford Inlet Lighthouse was the first permanently occupied structure on the Island and for many years the tallest and sturdiest. Its original foundation was three feet high and although the building is sheathed in wood clapboard, there is an interior wall of brick. The historic building survived many storms because of this well engineered construction.

In October 1878, wind driven, pounding waves worried Keeper Freeling Hewitt enough for him and his wife Abilene to leave the Lighthouse. They returned after the storm to their still standing home.

Another flooding storm in 1881 had 18 local residents abandon their battered, submerged houses and take shelter in the Lighthouse. Though completely surrounded by water, everyone weathered the storm here quite safely. Hereford was constructed in 1874 and a bit further east of where it sits today. It sat on high ground in a grove of trees and at a The Great Northeaster of 1913 safe distance from the ocean. Erosion from subsequent storms, however, brought the high tide closer and closer to the Lighthouse with each passing year.

A lighthouse board engineer, H. Bamber, conducted a thorough survey of the entire property in 1907. He reported to Washington that “the site is threatened by the encroachment of the south channel of the Hereford Inlet”. Six years later, in August, 1913, a severe Northeaster caused a washout of the southeast beach of the Inlet to a depth of about 10 feet. This undermined the northeast corner of the Lighthouse’s foundation so badly, it was perilously close to falling into the Inlet. One report says the building eventually began listing northward about 5 degrees.

Government engineers had no choice but to plot out a new location for the building, approximately 150 feet toward the western boundary of the property, near Central Avenue.

The new site was graded, a basement dug and a new foundation, 10 brick courses higher than the original was constructed on the lot. A house moving company removed the old brick foundation while at the same time laid a crib of huge timbers in its place. Trolley tracks were brought and installed and the entire four story building was pulled back to its new home, jacked up and set onto the new foundation, where it remains today.

A huge seawall now protects the City’s historic landmark from harms way.

The washout of the northeast corner of the Lighthouse after the storm of 1913

Pictured here the Lighthouse is supported on timbers ready to be moved.