George Gordon Meade and his Lighthouses

I've been reading Freeman Cleaves biography of G.G. Meade. I love reading biographies and this one is no different, although its taking me longer to read it than other books. I'm not sure why, except that the war part of the book is a little on the dry side so I only read 6 or 7 pages at a time.

Anyway, in the beginning of George Meade's career, he was an engineer who actually built lighthouses. I knew this before, but I didn't realize what building a lighthouse entailed. He started off by building a lighthouse in the Delaware Bay. He then moved on to Florida where he built quite a few lighthouses that still stand today. In New Jersey, one of his more famous lighthouses is the Barnegat Light on Long Beach Island....which you can actually climb (I've gone up it a bit...but being afraid of heights, I didn't do too well). And he eventually moved to the Great Lake region. Most of these structures still stand today.

What he did, was take a notebook and fill it with all sorts of data. He would study the tides, the flow of the water, the shoals, and anything else that would effect shipping. He also studied the ground and then he designed the lighthouse accordingly. Mr. Cleaves states in his book that there are still some of those notebooks on display throughout the eastern United States.

Not only did he build the lighthouses, but he also invented a lamp that would be easier to use than the lamps that the French had developed and as of the time that Meade started building them, the only one in use.

Here is a list of lighthouses that I know that he built. I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones I could find:
*Barnegat Light (New Jersey)
*Absecon Light (New Jersey)
*Cape May Light (New Jersey)
*Juniper Inlet Light (Florida)
*Sombrero Key Light (Florida)
*Sand Key Light (Florida)
*Rebecca Shoal Light (Florida)

My mom loved lighthouses and this was a way that the two of us could put our interests together and enjoy them. She just liked the lighthouses and I loved the history.

Many people remember George Meade as the victorious commander at Gettysburg but he had a whole other life in his lighthouses. Today those monuments tower over the sea as a silent memorial to a great man who many don't even realize was instrumental in getting these towers built: General George Gordon Meade.