Built in 1873, Cape Lookout Light Station’s Assistant Keepers’ Quarters housed assistant lightkeepers and their families for more than 75 years. Essentially a duplex, it could accommodate two keepers at a time. Life there demanded isolation, self-sufficiency, and constant attention to the enormous responsibility of maintaining the light, a task in which the keeper’s entire family helped, because failure could cost lives and the keeper his job. In a journal entry dated December 23, 1923, Assistant Light Keeper James Wilson Gillikin wrote of strong wind and rain from S.W., Christmas being near, the loneliness of spending Christmas there, and missing Annie very much. Light Keeper Isaac Van Willis serviced an electric lighthouse lamp, and light keeper A.J. Newton and Coast Guard officer Whitey Whitehurst received a visit from the children of another Coast Guardsman, showing how isolation made family life challenging. When the lighthouse was automated in 1950, lightkeepers and quarters to house them were no longer needed, and between 1950 and the time Cape Lookout became part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, the Assistant Keeper’s Quarters fell into disrepair.