Cape Hatteras Lighthouse restoration begins
OBX favorite expected to reopen for climbing in 2026 after $19.2M project
“We’ve worked on some pretty impressive landmarks up and down the East Coast, but this is by far the most iconic. It’s an honor, really.”
— Chris Dabek, Stone & Lime vice president
BUXTON, N.C. — The extensive $19.2 million Cape Hatteras Lighthouse restoration project begins Monday.
“When this lighthouse project is done, the lighthouse will be in better shape than it has been since it was built in 1870,” said David Hallac, National Parks of Eastern North Carolina superintendent.
The National Park Service awarded the Massachusetts-based Stone & Lime Historic Restoration Services the project contract in September.
The project is expected to take 18 months, and the lighthouse should reopen for climbing in 2026, according to National Park Service information. It has been closed to climbers since 2020.
“We’ve worked on some pretty impressive landmarks up and down the East Coast, but this is by far the most iconic,” said Chris Dabek, Stone & Lime vice president. “It’s an honor, really.”
Work involves removing the lighthouse’s coating — several layers of paint — as well as doing “extensive masonry repairs” before repainting it, Dabek said.
The company will replace about 15% of the lighthouse’s brick — roughly 40,000 bricks. The originals were made in Maryland, and Dabek said the company is still trying to source the custom brick for the project.
All the cast iron around the windows will be replicated and replaced — each custom piece of metal requiring a unique mold. Only about three companies in the country can do such work, and Allen Architectural Metals Inc. in Alabama will forge the metal for this project, Dabek said.
“We’ve got significant cast iron restoration work inside, as well,” he said.
The lighthouse is exposed to harsh environmental elements, such as constant salt air, strong winds and intense sun. The project will rehabilitate the interior and the exterior of the tallest and one of the country’s most iconic lighthouses.
“It will be more resilient, perhaps, than even when it was initially built,” Hallac said.
Designed and constructed between 1868-70, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998.
Facing threats from coastal erosion, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and all buildings comprising its light station were moved 2,900 feet inland in 1999.
The floating foundation that originally supported the lighthouse —“a grid of heart-pine timbers laid flat in two layers below the water table,” according to the National Park Service’s media guide — was found to be “in pristine condition” even though about 130 years had passed.
A ceremonial groundbreaking and walk-through tour was conducted Wednesday morning, when Hallac showed the new flow of pedestrian traffic and renderings of additional and improved walking pathways, and discussed the significant work to the lighthouse itself.
Hallac explained how the project will result in an improved visitor experience for the site’s half-million annual visitors.
Visitors will enter at what is now a gravel parking lot but will be a wide concrete pathway. They’ll “first come out to the Principal Keeper’s Quarters,” which is where the keeper, or lighthouse caretaker, would have lived.
The path continues to the next building, the Double Keepers’ Quarters — which houses Museum of the Sea — and then several options lead to different views of the lighthouse, including one path that will wrap around behind it. Visitors will exit by the current entrance, which has a bookstore and restroom facilities.
“We’re putting back important features that are unique to this lighthouse that have not been here for many decades, for whatever reason,” Hallac said.
This includes installing fencing around the two keepers’ quarters buildings, as well as “pediments” — decorative architectural features that stick out — above each of the lighthouse windows.
An iron fence similar to the one around the U.S. Treasury building once also surrounded the lighthouse, and will be reconstructed, he added.
The project also involves installing an LED replica of the original first-order Fresnel lens, which Artworks Florida is fabricating. This will replace an airport beacon currently providing mariners a navigation aid.
Thirty-six stones bearing the names of the 83 lighthouse keepers, currently in storage, also will be displayed along the paths following the project, according to Hallac.
Left around the original lighthouse site until 2015, the stones were moved to an amphitheater setting by the parking lot with the help of the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society, he said.
“To facilitate this project, we did have to remove them; and we actually think that the new placement of the stones will highlight the importance of the lighthouse keepers even more,” Hallac said.
The stones serve “as a testament to all the work they did to keep this lighthouse going, to take care of it and to protect mariners and others off of the coast.”
For project updates, visit go.nps.gov/cahalighthouserestoration.