Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

Off North Carolina's Outer Banks, the shifting sandbars of Diamond Shoals have wrecked so many ships that the waters earned the name 'Graveyard of the Atlantic.' Rising 198 feet in bold black-and-white spirals, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is America's tallest brick lighthouse and has warned mariners away from that danger since 1870. In 1999, as erosion brought the sea to its very foundation, engineers achieved one of the most remarkable feats of historic preservation in American history: they moved the entire 4,800-ton tower nearly half a mile inland, intact.

An earlier, shorter lighthouse first marked Cape Hatteras in 1803, but it proved too weak to warn ships away from Diamond Shoals, a network of shifting underwater sandbars extending miles offshore that had already claimed hundreds of vessels. The U.S. Lighthouse Board built the current 198-foot brick tower in 1870, the tallest brick lighthouse in the country, its distinctive black-and-white spiral pattern designed as a daytime marker distinguishing it from nearby lighthouses.

Coastal erosion steadily narrowed the beach around the lighthouse over the 20th century, and by the 1980s the Atlantic had crept dangerously close to its foundation despite repeated efforts to armor the shoreline. Engineers and preservationists debated solutions for years before settling on an audacious plan: physically relocating the entire structure.

In the summer of 1999, engineers lifted the intact 4,800-ton lighthouse onto a system of steel rails and hydraulic jacks and moved it 2,900 feet inland over 23 days, restoring roughly the same distance from the shoreline it had when built in 1870. The relocation is regarded as one of the greatest historic preservation engineering achievements in the world. The lighthouse remains an active aid to navigation, maintained by the National Park Service within Cape Hatteras National Seashore.