Sharps Island Light

Sharps Island Light, in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay near Tilghman Island, is the third lighthouse built for this site and is especially known for the sharp lean caused by ice damage in 1977. The first light was erected in 1838 and moved in 1848 as the island eroded. A second, built in 1866, was shoved from its foundations by an ice floe in 1881 and drifted nearly five miles with its keepers inside before they escaped unharmed. The present sparkplug lighthouse was completed in 1882, staffed until 1938, and later automated. Deactivated in 2010, it remains one of the bay’s most distinctive and endangered offshore beacons.