The story of the Hog Island Light begins with produce. In 1827, Captain Lewis Matthews loaded the schooner Providence with sweet potatoes at Thomas's Wharf on the Machipongo River -- the first shipment from Virginia's Eastern Shore to New York City. The wharf sat at one of the few deep-water ports on the sea side of the Delmarva Peninsula, and soon vessels running between Norfolk and New York were stopping regularly to load produce during the growing season. But the coastline between the Assateague Light to the north and Cape Charles at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay remained unlit -- a dangerous stretch of open water with no beacon to guide ships toward the Great Machipongo Inlet. In 1853, Congress funded a lighthouse on Hog Island to fill that gap. The first tower was a modest affair: 45 feet of whitewashed brick with a keeper's dwelling beside it.

Erosion made short work of that first tower's location. By the 1890s, the advancing shoreline threatened to undermine the brick structure, and in 1896 the government erected a replacement more than half a mile back from the ocean, in a clearing carved from the dense pine forest that once covered most of Hog Island. This second lighthouse was an octagonal iron skeleton tower standing 194 feet tall -- the second tallest in the United States at the time. It was the sister light of the nearby Cape Charles Lighthouse, built in 1895 at 191 feet. Both were skeletal steel superstructures, but the Hog Island tower was painted black to distinguish it from Cape Charles, which was painted white. An antenna on top gave Hog Island its three-foot height advantage. The 10-foot-tall first-order Fresnel lens, produced by the Henry-LePaute Company in France and originally installed in the Cape Charles tower, was transferred to Hog Island in 1895 to throw its beam across the dark Atlantic waters.

The barrier island refused to stay put. The 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac hurricane damaged the light station and gouged away great swaths of shoreline. That same year brought one piece of good news: both the Hog Island and Cape Charles lights were electrified, ending the laborious routine of hauling buckets of oil up to the lantern room. But the sea kept coming. The 1938 New England hurricane, passing just offshore of the Delmarva Peninsula before slamming into Long Island, finally toppled the original 1853 tower -- by then standing 50 feet offshore, surrounded by breakers. The half-mile buffer that had seemed so generous in 1896 was dissolving. By 1948, waves lapped at the base of the iron tower. The Coast Guard deactivated the light and, rather than disassemble and relocate the structure, demolished it with explosive charges.

The village of Broadwater, which once sat near the light station, vanished beneath the waves along with the rest of Hog Island's eastern shore. Today the site where the lighthouse stood is nearly a mile out to sea. But the massive Fresnel lens survived. When the light was deactivated, crews carefully removed the 10-foot-tall optic and sent it to the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, where it was displayed for decades. In 2004, the lens was moved to an enclosed pavilion on the Portsmouth, Virginia, waterfront -- a structure designed to resemble the lighthouse's own lantern room. The railroad had already made the lighthouse less essential; the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, completed in the late 19th century, shifted Eastern Shore produce to rail cars instead of ships. And the establishment of LORAN navigation stations along the coast during World War II further diminished the role of lighthouses in guiding maritime traffic. The Hog Island Light had become obsolete twice over -- first by technology, then by geology. Its lens, glowing quietly in a waterfront pavilion, is the last piece of a world the Atlantic has reclaimed entirely.