THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502240171
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS
STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: EDENTON LENGTH: Long : 220 lines
OUT OF PLACE and forlorn, a 108-year old former U.S. lighthouse with a squatty square tower and a long-blind eye now broods over a backwater of Edenton's waterfront.
Once the lighthouse signaled safe passage to Ply-mouth through the multiple mouths of the Roanoke River at the western end of Albemarle Sound.
But the old wooden structure is a home, now, not a beacon, and dwelling within the former lighthouse keeper's quarters is a 73-year-old Renaissance sailor who would surely feel comfortable in several other centuries besides this one.
Emmett Wiggins has spent a long life looking for whatever kind of trouble seemed interesting. He has been an aviator, a deep-sea diver, Capt. Ahab on a salvage tugboat, Jason raging at what he considers 40 years of golden fleecing, a latter-day Ulysses who preferred to zig when he might have zagged on the voyage home from Troy.
In Wiggins' yard is a silvery 1946 Luscombe seaplane that many aviation historians will tell you belongs in a museum. Wiggins has been a pilot since he left the U.S. Marines after World War II, and until a few years ago he used to fly the beautiful little floatplane to scout logging sites in the gloomy backwaters of the Albemarle.
Wiggins came from a Gates County family of loggers and woodsmen, and his father moved to Edenton to run a sawmill when Wiggins was 4 years old.
``Emmett was a fine pilot, but you were never sure what would happen next,'' said Frank Habit, an Elizabeth City developer who grew up in Edenton and often hitched a sightseeing ride in Wiggins' plane.
``One time he took me to see somebody he knew in Greenville, and he splashed down on the Tar River in front of the guy's house like everybody came to call that way,'' Habit said.
Implanted like Stonehenge slabs along Wiggins' waterfront are massive chunks of Italian marble that he salvaged from a deep shipwreck off the Outer Banks.
``Nobody else had been able to get the marble off the bottom,'' said Wiggins. He had visions of selling the marble to - well, to anybody who wanted to start another Parthenon.
The stones are still in Edenton.
Also in the yard are a couple of vintage Lincoln Town Cars, and under his boathouse roof is a 50-year-old Chris Craft Catalina, a splendid wooden yacht that some powerboat fanciers would cry big wet tears for. Alongside is a mahogany speedboat that once thrilled girls who saw the boat throwing a wake around Edenton Bay.
Tied up on Edenton's elegant downtown waterfront is the 100-foot tug Maryland, another glorious old vessel that Wiggins owns. It's probably the last tow boat built with riveted rather than welded plates, he says.
The Maryland's 20-foot-long Fairbanks-Morse diesel engine with six cylinders as big as beer kegs was Wiggins' 200-rpm pride and joy when he pushed and pulled logging and salvage equipment around the sounds and rivers.
Emmett Wiggins likes his machinery large enough and tough enough to fight back when you put a wrench to it.
On this particular day last week, Wiggins was entertaining company in the cluttered little parlor inside his lighthouse-home. Wiggins is skinny as a spar, and at the moment he's nursing a sore back.
``Had a spine operation a couple of years ago, but my back still hurts,'' he said.
Already Wiggins has churned up a complicated discussion about moving his lighthouse, home and all, to Plymouth, where a local historical society wants to install it on the Roanoke riverfront grounds of the Port O'Plymouth Museum.
``I want Plymouth to have the lighthouse,'' Wiggins said he told Patricia Jane Monte, the 31-year-old curator of the museum, ``but I want to put it on a barge or an old ferryboat so we can move it around, up and down the coast, as a display of marine history.''
Neither Monte nor Bruce Roberts, a zealous lighthouse buff who with his wife Cheryl operates the Lighthouse Gallery in Nags Head, think much of making a cruise ship out of the old beacon that once stood solidly planted on 24 screw-piles sunk into the bottom of Albemarle Sound.
``It doesn't seem like a good idea; putting it on a barge,'' said Monte. ``We want it moved over to the Plymouth waterfront, and we have no objections if you keep on living in the house below the lighthouse.''
Wiggins mentions that he has already been approached by the town of Edenton.
``They want to keep the lighthouse,'' he said. ``Make a museum out of it down on this waterfront. They want my Maryland, too.''
Roberts, founder of the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society, which does good works for any and all North Carolina navigational relics, adroitly steers the lighthouse back toward Plymouth.
``Edenton's charm is pre-Revolution Colonial,'' says Roberts. ``The lighthouse architecture would clash against the Edenton waterfront.''
``And anyhow,'' says Monte, ``the lighthouse will always be associated with Plymouth and the Roanoke River. This structure was built because of Plymouth.''
So it was.
Long before the Declaration of Independence, the mighty Roanoke River was a roiling artery that brought down the first strong pulses of colonial commerce from the pioneers who settled in the border heartlands of North Carolina and Virginia.
The great river rises 380 miles back up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where trout still jump in those cold, clear waters.
Once, before the Roanoke hydroelectric dams were built, rockfish by the millions came upriver to Virginia to spawn in the fast waters.
One of the reasons the Dismal Swamp Canal was completed in the early 1800s was to carry the early trade of the Roanoke River valley from Albemarle Sound to the ocean port of Norfolk by way of Plymouth, Edenton and Elizabeth City. Flatboat men could then move cargoes 112 miles down the Roanoke from Weldon, where the rapids began.
But even modern tow boat captains like Emmett Wiggins sometimes find it difficult to locate the deep-water mouth of the Roanoke where it pours into the sound in three murky channels known as Eastmost River, Middle River, and the southerly main course of the Roanoke itself.
And to make it even more of a navigator's nightmare, you can sail up the Cashie River between the Chowan River and the Roanoke, hang a left from the Cashie (Cash-eye) through a narrow cut into Middle River, and still come out into the main Roanoke River upstream of Plymouth.
So, as long ago as 1834, the struggling U.S. Congress authorized the then-huge sum of $10,000 to build a lightship to mark the best mouth of the Roanoke.
Wynne Dough, curator of the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo, says early records show the first Roanoke River lightship went on station in 1835 as a 125-ton vessel with a light that stood 43 feet above the water. It was visible for 13 miles.
During the Civil War, southern forces removed the lightship so it would give no comfort to Union naval vessels. Later, at least one lightship was deliberately sunk in the river above Plymouth, but there is still dispute over whether Confederates sank the Roanoke lightship to block Union vessels or whether Union sailors created the obstruction to prevent the Confederate ram Albemarle from coming downriver.
The armored Albemarle was built far up the Roanoke in a masterful piece of southern wartime shipbuilding. The Albemarle successfully broke out into Albemarle Sound in 1864, and on May 5 it defeated a sizable Union fleet in a battle off Edenton.
After the Civil War, the first fixed Roanoke River light on pilings was established in January of 1867. In 1885, the light fueled by whale oil was destroyed by fire. It was rebuilt, but ice badly damaged the structure and the keeper's house the following year.
At least part of the lighthouse and living quarters now occupied by Wiggins was built in 1887 to replace all of the previous Roanoke beacons. It was known as the Roanoke River Channel Entrance Light.
The new navigation marker was then described as ``a fixed white light of the fourth order.'' Wiggins thinks this is the equipment he found in the squatty tower. There is still in place a huge fresnel lens as big as a modern oil drum.
``The original light was a whale-oil lamp with a weight that kept the round wick constantly moved upward as it burned away,'' Wiggins said.
Wiggins got his lighthouse in 1955 from Elijah Tate, a member of the old U.S. Lighthouse Service, who lived in Coinjock for many years. Tate, too, was a celebrated waterman and all-around marine mechanic.
When the U.S. Lighthouse Service replaced the old Roanoke light with a fixed modern light, Tate bought the pile-built structure along with a similar lighthouse at the mouth of the Pasquotank River below Elizabeth City and another at the south end of Roanoke Island in Dare County.
Tate had difficulty uprooting and moving the Pasquotank River light and the Outer Banks beacons. Both fell into the water during moving operations.
``Elijah was a friend of mine, and he told me I could have the Roanoke lighthouse if I would move it,'' Wiggins said.
It was just the sort of challenge that Wiggins liked.
``I had an old Landing Craft Infantry that I used as a barge, so I went out to the light and knocked away all of the pilings except those at the diagonal corners,'' Wiggins said.
``Then I sank the LCI down far enough to float under the lighthouse. When I pumped the water out, the barge came up under the heavy wooden sills of the main lighthouse structure. As soon as I cut away the remaining piles, everything floated free and I sailed back to Edenton with my new home,'' said Wiggins. ``The whole job took about 36 hours.''
The huge 14-by-9-inch heart pine sills that support the entire lighthouse structure are still so sound that Wiggins' home is as four-square plumb as the day it was built more than a century ago.
But happy endings have a way of eluding Wiggins.
About the time he moved into the lighthouse on the Edenton waterfront, he began the 40-year litigation with the state, county and city over property that he claims he inherited from his father. Part of the land is in Rocky Hock, up the Chowan River from Edenton, and the remainder is the small area where he now has the lighthouse, his beautiful seaplane, the Lincolns and the memorabilia of a lifetime of deliberately sought struggle.
``They're charging me taxes for the land,'' he said last week. ``It's on the books in my name.''
But the ownership remains disputed, and Wiggins is trying to work out an arrangement that would somehow get the lighthouse and Rocky Hock titles cleared in exchange for deeding it over to the town of Plymouth.
``That would be hard for Plymouth to work out, I think,'' Monte said. ``But we still want the lighthouse.''
Chowan County officials and Anne-Marie Kelly, Edenton's town manager, said there were no firm proposals to keep Wiggins' lighthouse in Edenton.
``I don't know of any plans to oppose Plymouth's effort to get the light,'' said Cliff Copeland, Chowan county manager.
Kelly said there had been ``very preliminary talks about putting the lighthouse on the Edenton waterfront, but nothing more than that.''
Meanwhile, Monte and Roberts hope to keep the negotiations moving, somehow skirting Wiggins' dream of putting the lighthouse on a barge so he can sail it around as a floating museum.
``In my heart, that's what I truly want,'' Wiggins said over and over. ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
[Color Photo]
Now-blind lighthouse back in the spotlight
Staff photos by
DREW C. WILSON
Built 108 years ago, the Roanoke River lighthouse stood on piles at
the water's mouth.
Emmett Wiggins, the lighthouse's owner and resident, discusses the
old beacon with Bruce Roberts, photographer and founder of the Outer
Banks Lighthouse Society.
The Roanoke River lighthouse's squatty square tower now looks out
blindly over the banks of the Chowan River at Edenton, a far sprint
from its old home near Plymouth. A move is underway to decide
whether the lighthouse should be permanently situated in its old
home city of Plymouth or given to Edenton.
Map
KEN WRIGHT/Staff
by CNB