Reedy Island Range Lighthouse - Taylors Bridge, DE - Landlocked Lighthouses on Waymarking.com

Sitting in the middle of farm country near Taylors Bridge, Delaware, Reedy Island Range Rear Lighthouse looks very conspicuous as you first approach it. The lighthouse was built in the early 1900s to assist with moving ships up the shallow Delaware River to the Port of Philadelphia.

"Near the end of the nineteenth century, commercial interests in Philadelphia felt that they were at a great disadvantage compared to other major port cities due to the shallowness of the Delaware River. The drafts of large ocean carriers exceeded the depth of the Delaware River, forcing these vessels to call at New York, Boston, or Baltimore. To remedy this situation, a Joint Committee on the Improvement of the Harbor of Philadelphia and the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers was formed. This committee urged the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge a new thirty-foot-deep and 600-foot-wide channel in the Delaware River, based on the following reasoning:
The importance of this improvement to the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and the great West, can hardly be overstated. The Delaware River is the natural maritime outlet of an area of over 54,000 square miles, with a population of nearly 7,000,000 people. This area covers the manufacturing, coal, iron, steel, oil, and shipbuilding centers of the United States; and without a proper channel to the sea, the movement of these products to the markets of the world is embarrassed, and the cost of transportation is greatly increased.
Swayed by this argument, Congress passed a river and harbor act on March 3, 1899 authorizing the improvement. As the new channel did not always align with the existing one, the Lighthouse Service was forced to relocate some of its existing range lights and erect additional ones. Congress provided $60,000 on March 3, 1901 and an additional $30,000 on June 28, 1902 for establishing the Reedy Island, Port Penn, and Finn Point ranges on new sites. Two parcels of land were purchased for the new Reedy Island Range in 1901. A thirty-five-acre piece of marshland on the Delaware River between the mouths of the Appoquinimink River and Blackbird Creek was acquired for $1,050 for the front range, and a 5.62-acre parcel, located 2.8 miles to the southwest in the village of Taylors Bridge, was purchased at a cost of $525 for the rear range." (visit link)

"Today, the light is powered by a DCB-224 aero beacon and is maintained by the Coast Guard. The lighthouse and barn are all that remain of the station. On April 6, 2002, vandals set the keeper’s quarters a blaze, completely burning the building. The oil house, which was located next to the keeper’s quarters, was also damaged to the point that it had to be torn down."
(visit link)

The Reedy Island Range Rear Lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.

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Date Logged Log User Rating   02/10/2021 oboegary & delaware hiker visited it