In 1854, after a decade of prompting from Jonathan Pitney, the father of Atlantic City, the U.S. Congress appropriated $35,000 to build a lighthouse on Absecon Island, and on December 5, 1854, the Camden and Atlantic Land Co. transferred the land to the U.S. government for $520. Construction began in 1855 under Major Hartman Bache of the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the Army, and he was replaced by Lieutenant George Gordon Meade, who later commanded the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg. In 1856, an additional $17,436.62 was appropriated to finish the project, bringing the final cost to $52,436.62. Absecon Lighthouse was first lit on January 15, 1857, with a first-order Fresnel lens made by the Parisian firm of Sautter & Cie and illuminated by FUnck's mineral oil lamps, and its beam could be seen nearly 20 miles at sea. In 1876, the lighthouse stood 1200 feet from the ocean, and although beach erosion in the following years brought the water to the edges of the grounds, jetties built in the 1870s successfully reversed the process and eventually restored about the original relationship to the water. The lighthouse first used incandescent oil vapor lamps in 1910, electricity for the beacon on July 1, 1925, and was decommissioned and extinguished on July 11, 1933. The lantern was briefly relit in 1954 for Atlantic City's centennial celebration, a small visitors' center was built at the base in 1962, and Governor Richard Hughes relit the lens on December 31, 1963, for New Jersey's Tercentenary year. Absecon Lighthouse was placed on New Jersey's Register of Historic Places on September 11, 1970, and on the National Register of Historic Places on January 25, 1971. In 1988, the Inlet Public/Private Association was formed and adopted Absecon Lighthouse as its logo to signify the rebirth of the Inlet section of Atlantic City; in 1994, it formally adopted the lighthouse and funded a Historic Structure Report that led to the tower's restoration. Sara Cureton was hired in 1995 as Executive Director, filling the position of Lightkeeper for the first time since 1933, restoration of the tower began in May 1997, reconstruction of the Keeper's Dwelling began shortly afterward, the historic tower opened to visitors in 1999 while work continued on the dwelling, and the Keeper's Dwelling was completed and opened to the public in 2001.