St. Clement's Island Lighthouse

On May 19, 1864, Confederates raided St. Clement's Island to destroy the 1851 lighthouse. Capt. John Goldsmith, a county resident who had once owned the island, led the attack after joining the Confederate army in Virginia. In a thirty-foot sailboat, the Swann, Goldsmith slipped past a United States gunboat anchored nearby and landed on the island intending to blow up the lighthouse. Keeper Jerome McWilliams, a former neighbor who knew Goldsmith, persuaded him that moving McWilliams's pregnant wife from the keeper's dwelling beside the lighthouse would be dangerous. Goldsmith abandoned that part of the plan, but destroyed the lens and lamp and carried off the oil and light tender. Two days later, Cmdr. Foxhall A. Parker of the U.S.S. King Philip warned from St. Mary's, Maryland, that while so many rebel sympathizers remained in Maryland and on Virginia's Eastern Shore, the lighthouses there were not safe without a guard on shore to protect them. Despite Union gunboats patrolling the Potomac River and a Federal supply depot just north of St. Clements Island at Bushwood Wharf, Confederate blockade runners still moved undetected to and from Virginia. Local dories known as "Black nancys," painted or stained black, played an important role in these nightly runs by quietly carrying supplies for the South through the darkness.

Maryland · United States