Qualla: Absecon Lighthouse

Absecon Lighthouse: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wsurg, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Absecon Lighthouse was designed by Major George G. Meade in 1854. Nine years later, the same Meade would command the Union Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg and stop Robert E. Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania. Before he was a Civil War general, Meade was an engineer in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, building lighthouses up and down the East Coast. The Absecon light was one of his late-career commissions, and it is one of his most enduring. The brick tower stands 171 feet high - the tallest lighthouse in New Jersey, the third-tallest masonry lighthouse in the entire United States, and the only place from which a visitor today can see what George Meade was thinking about before the war that made him famous.

Read more: Absecon Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Wsurg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Absecon Lighthouse: Why It Was Built

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa Andres, CC BY 2.0. Absecon Inlet, where the lighthouse stands, was one of the most dangerous stretches of shoreline on the Atlantic seaboard in the early nineteenth century. The shoals shifted constantly. Sailing ships running south past New York for Philadelphia or Baltimore frequently misjudged t...

Read more: Absecon Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Lisa Andres | CC BY 2.0

Absecon Lighthouse: The Fresnel Lens

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ted Kerwin, CC BY 2.0. Inside the watch room at the top of the tower sits the original first-order Fresnel lens - the largest size of Fresnel lens manufactured. It weighs 12,800 pounds. It is made of lead glass cut into thousands of precisely-angled prisms that bend and concentrate the light from a sin...

Read more: Absecon Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Ted Kerwin | CC BY 2.0

Absecon Lighthouse: George Meade's Tower

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit darlingtrk, CC BY 2.0. George Gordon Meade joined the Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1842 and spent the next two decades working on coastal infrastructure - jetties, sea walls, lighthouses. He designed Barnegat Light to the north and Absecon Light to the south, and the structural similarities betw...

Read more: Absecon Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: darlingtrk | CC BY 2.0

Absecon Lighthouse: Decommissioned, Then Saved

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Miguel, CC BY 2.0. By 1933 the lighthouse was deactivated. The growth of Atlantic City and the proliferation of automated coastal navigation aids had made the Absecon Light redundant. The tower sat dark for several decades, weathered, vandalized, and threatened with demolition. In 1964, the photogr...

Read more: Absecon Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Ron Miguel | CC BY 2.0

Absecon Lighthouse: 228 Steps

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Miguel, CC BY 2.0. The lighthouse is open to the public. For a small donation, visitors climb the 228 steps from the base to the watch room and walk out onto the exterior gallery that rings the lantern. The view from the top is one of the broadest in New Jersey: the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the ...

Read more: Absecon Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Ron Miguel | CC BY 2.0