On December 1, 1875, the Currituck Beach Lighthouse lit the remaining dark stretch of the North Carolina coast between Cape Henry and Bodie Island. Built beginning in 1873 after repeated reports of ships, cargoes, and lives lost along 40 miles of unlit shoreline, it was completed two years later and became the last major brick lighthouse built on the Outer Banks. Its unpainted exterior distinguishes it from other regional lighthouses, and its first order Fresnel lens, the largest of seven lens sizes, originally used a U.S. mineral oil lamp with five concentric wicks. Before electricity, weights and a clockwork mechanism rotated the lens, and the keeper raised the weights by hand every two and a half hours. Automated in 1939 when the United State Coast Guard assumed the duties of the Bureau of Lighthouses, the 158-foot beacon still serves as an aid to navigation, flashing every 20 seconds and visible for 18 nautical miles. The Keepers' House, completed in 1876 from pre-cut and labeled materials shipped by barge and assembled on site, housed three keepers and their families in a duplex until automation ended the need for attendants in 1939. By the late 1970s the house had badly deteriorated, and in 1980 Outer Banks Conservationists, Inc. leased the property from the State of North Carolina and began phased restoration. Other historic structures in the compound include cisterns, a privy, and a former storage building, as well as a smaller Keepers' House moved to the site in 1920 from the Long Point Lighthouse Station and used by the principal keeper's family until 1939.