Chapter 5

The Light and the War

1764–1783 · Built by New York, besieged by New Jersey

The oldest operating lighthouse in America, and the Loyalist stronghold at its feet.

The 1764 Sandy Hook Lighthouse at night — an octagonal rubble-stone tower with a lit whale-oil lamp, silhouetted against a moonlit sea, colorized — COLORIZED
Placeholder illustration for Phase 0 — replace with archival night photograph before publishing.

Two things were built on Sandy Hook in the second half of the seventeen sixties and one of them is still standing. The lighthouse went up in seventeen sixty-four, financed by a lottery organized in New York and administered by the Corporation of the City of New York, on land the Hartshorne family had transferred to Federal-then- Colonial-then-State-then-Federal ownership through a series of transactions that went on well into the nineteenth century. It was lit on June eleventh, seventeen sixty-four, and it has been lit, with brief interruptions during two wars and one automation transition, ever since.

The second thing built on the Hook in the same decade — the small customs and supply station beside it — was destroyed in one of those wars.

Placeholder narrative for the Phase 0 prototype. Real copy will draw from the Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, the New Jersey Volunteers Loyalist records, William S. Stryker's The Capture of the Block House at Toms River (1883) for the Huddy affair, and the NPS Sandy Hook Light NHL nomination file.

The war on the Hook lasted seven years and hinged on the fact that Sandy Hook was, and is, exceptionally difficult ground for anyone without a small navy. The peninsula is long and narrow, the mainland approach is a marsh, and the anchorage on the harbor side is deep enough for a fully-crewed man-of-war to sit within cannon range of the beach. In March seventeen seventy-six a patriot detachment rowed out to the tower under cover of fog, forced the door, carried off the lamps and the whale-oil stores, and rowed back. That was the last time the patriots held it.

Within three months the British had it back, garrisoned it, and built a small stockade around it. The Loyalist ensign flew from a pole on the beach for the next seven years. Refugee families whose houses on the mainland had been burned in the ongoing partisan war came out on ships and settled in a small tent town at the base of the tower. At the peak of the occupation there were perhaps six hundred people on the Hook, most of them women and children.

The Sandy Hook Lighthouse in British hands, summer 1777 — the tower surrounded by tents and a small stockade, a Loyalist ensign on a pole, a patrol at the base

The whole peninsula stayed in British hands the entire war.

Placeholder — stand-in for period military illustration.

A period letter dispatch from Lt. Col. Benjamin Tupper to Gen. George Washington, dated June 21, 1776, reporting an artillery bombardment against the Sandy Hook lighthouse — COLORIZED
Placeholder — stand-in for the Washington Papers, Library of Congress.

*The walls of the said tower being so firm I could make no Impression.*

Tupper's dispatch to Washington is one of the small documents that carries a great deal of the war. It is one page, it takes an educated reader six minutes to work through, and the single sentence about the tower has been quoted in every history of the Sandy Hook Light for two hundred and fifty years. Washington ordered the attempt on June eighteenth; Tupper marched two field-pieces to the point on the mainland closest to the tower — the location known today as Highland Beach — and opened fire on the morning of the twenty-first.

The walls were and are three and a half feet of solid rubble masonry at the base. Six-pound iron shot at four hundred yards did not penetrate them. Nine-pound shot pitted the surface but did not penetrate them either. The Continental Congress, when the estimate for a proper demolition came in — sixty tons of powder, eighteen guns, three weeks of siege — declined to fund it. The tower stayed in British hands.

The pit marks were visible on the exterior masonry until the pre- Civil War repairs of the eighteen fifties finally faced them in smooth stone. Guides on the modern tower still point out where the faces are darker.

The map above traces the war chronologically along the peninsula and the mainland opposite it. The tower goes up on the north end in seventeen sixty-four. The March seventeen seventy-six lamp raid is at the same point. The Tupper bombardment fires from the mainland across the channel three months later. Two years after that, the army General Clinton is trying to march north from Philadelphia to New York after the Battle of Monmouth — fought thirty miles inland — embarks from the Hook onto Royal Navy transports for the last segment of the withdrawal. And in April seventeen eighty-two the Huddy hanging happens at the water's edge on the mainland just below the ridge.

Five points, one polygon, seven years.

Joshua Huddy was a Monmouth militia captain, well known in the county, captured in April seventeen eighty-two at the block house at Toms River in a Loyalist raid, held on a prison ship in New York Harbor, and — on the twelfth of April — brought across the bay by a party under Richard Lippincott and hanged from a hastily-built gibbet at the water's edge in what is now downtown Highlands. A hand-lettered placard was pinned to his body. It read Up goes Huddy for Philip White.

Huddy Park in Highlands holds the memorial obelisk the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated in nineteen twenty-six on the ground where the killing is believed to have occurred. A small plaque at the base of the obelisk carries the placard's line. The park is visited most heavily on Fourth-of-July mornings, when a brief ceremony that has been held annually since nineteen sixty-two lays a wreath. The wreath ceremony is worth watching.

The hanging of patriot Captain Joshua Huddy at the Highlands shore, April 12, 1782 — a gibbet at the water's edge, Loyalist irregulars with muskets, small witnessing crowd, colorized

Then COLORIZED

Placeholder — stand-in for period reconstruction.

Now

Placeholder — stand-in for ATH matched shoot.

The retaliatory motive behind the killing was straightforward — Loyalist Philip White had been killed by a New Jersey militia unit some days earlier, under circumstances the Loyalists insisted were an execution — but the reasoning did not rest well with anyone. Washington demanded Lippincott's surrender to face trial. British Commander Sir Guy Carleton refused. The Continental Congress ordered that one of the British prisoners at Lancaster be executed by lot in reprisal; a young captain named Charles Asgill drew the lot; the French court intervened; the French court intervened again; Asgill was released and returned to England, where he lived until eighteen twenty-three and never spoke publicly of the affair.

The Huddy incident is the one that almost broke the peace negotiations of seventeen eighty-two, and — for a stretch of weeks that summer — put a specific New Jersey shore killing at the center of the diplomatic exchanges that would end the war. Historians of the Revolution generally treat it as a warning about how partisan-war logic corrodes conventional-war restraint even after conventional-war outcomes are settled. The line at the base of the obelisk is worth reading with that in mind.

The lighthouse was returned to American authority in seventeen eighty-three. Its lamps were relit later that year. It has been lit, more or less continuously, for two hundred and forty-one years. It survived a brief attempt by Federal authorities during the War of eighteen twelve to convert it into a battery — Fort Gates — that lasted eleven months and disbanded when the war ended and the lamps went back on. It survived electrification in the nineteen forties. It survived automation in the nineteen sixties. It survived Hurricane Sandy in twenty twelve, when the surge came within six feet of the base and stopped, per NOAA's post-storm survey, ten and one-half feet below the beacon.

Every subsequent chapter of this project features it as background. When you look at a map of the Twin Lights, the Sandlass resort, the Rum Row anchorages, the Fort Hancock parade ground, the modern Photo Map — the small dot at the north end of the peninsula is the 1764 tower. It has been the fixed point of every era of what happened here.