Most American lighthouses are sturdy brick or stone cylinders. Hereford is something rarer. Its fifty-foot tower rises out of a Stick-style Victorian frame house, all gables and decorative bracing and a wraparound porch - the same architectural language the painted Cape May cottages were speaking thirty miles south. Inside, the keeper's quarters look like a comfortable seaside home: parlor, kitchen, bedrooms upstairs, a stairway that turns and climbs into the lantern room. The whole structure was painted, for most of its working life, white with red trim and blue shutters - patriotic and tourist-friendly. In 2003 a restoration team scraped back to the original paint and returned the lighthouse to its historically accurate buff color. The beacon still works. It sweeps the Atlantic up to eighteen nautical miles out.

Hereford Inlet has always been an unstable place. Currents shift the sand; storms remake the shoreline. In August 1913 a hurricane drove water into the lighthouse foundation and threatened to take the whole structure with it. The Coast Guard's predecessor agency closed the light, brought in engineers, and physically moved the building 150 feet inland. It reopened in 1914 on dry ground. The original location is now underwater or beneath the modern beach. The relocation was not unique among American lighthouses - Cape Hatteras would later make the same journey - but in 1913 it was a notable feat of engineering. The lighthouse keeper at the time supervised the move, packed his family and his furniture, and started over.

In 1938 the keeper was Ferdinand Heinzman, and on the day in question he was painting the upper trim. A passing coastguardsman saw smoke coming out of an upstairs window and called the fire department. Heinzman tried to fight the flames from inside but was pushed back by the heat. He went outside, found a ladder, attached a garden hose, climbed to the second story, and fought the fire through the window. The lighthouse survived. The official investigation concluded that the painting had caused spontaneous combustion - a paint rag or solvent ignited by its own chemical heat. The lighthouse keepers across this stretch of coast were the kind of people who fought house fires with garden hoses. The job required it.

In 1964 the Coast Guard decided automation was simpler than maintaining a keeper. They built a small skeletal tower nearby, transferred the light to it, and boarded up the lighthouse. For eighteen years the building sat dark. Salt and weather worked on the wood. The New Jersey State Police took the adjoining Life-Saving Station for its Marine Services Unit. In 1982 a group of North Wildwood residents petitioned to take over the lighthouse itself. They got it. In 1986 the Coast Guard moved the working light back inside the original tower, where it had belonged. North Wildwood's parks superintendent, Steve Murray, took charge of the grounds and planted a garden that has become one of the lighthouse's signature attractions. A new VRB-25 beacon was installed in 2018. The lighthouse is once again working - both as a museum and as an active aid to navigation maintained by the Coast Guard.

The lighthouse stands in what is now North Wildwood, but in the nineteenth century the local fishing village was called Anglesea. When storms struck, residents of Anglesea fled to the lighthouse for shelter - the only substantial building nearby with elevated rooms and stout walls. Captain Hewitt and his successors took them in for days at a time. The lighthouse functioned simultaneously as a navigation aid and as a community storm shelter, an arrangement no modern building code would endorse and that nonetheless worked. The Anglesea name survives mostly in the lighthouse's history and in a few local landmarks. The village became the present-day Wildwoods - one of the most heavily developed barrier-island strips on the Atlantic - and the lighthouse remains the oldest building of consequence along the entire stretch.