The Great Beds Light Station,
Raritan Bay, N. J.
A specimen of iron cylinder
construction.
Eighty thousand dollars was appropriated for doing the work. In August, 1896, the contractors formally agreed to build the lighthouse for $56,000, and, more than that, to have the lantern burning within a single year.
By the last of September a huge, unwieldy foundation caisson was framing in a Baltimore shipyard. This caisson was a bottomless wooden box, 32 feet square and 12 feet high, with the top nearly as thick as the height of a man, so that it would easily sustain the weight of the great iron cylinder soon to be placed upon it. It was lined and caulked, painted inside and out to make it air-tight and water-tight, and then dragged out into the bay, together with half an acre of mud and dock timbers. Here the workmen crowned it with the first two courses of the iron cylinder—a collar 30 feet in diameter and about 12 feet high. Inside of this a second cylinder, a steel air-shaft, five feet in diameter, rose from a hole in the centre of the caisson, this providing a means of entrance and exit when the structure should reach the shoal.
Upon the addition of this vast weight of iron and steel, the wooden caisson, although it weighed nearly a hundred tons, disappeared completely under the water, leaving in view only the great black rim of the iron cylinder and the top of the air-shaft.
On April 7th of the next year the fleet was ready to start on its voyage of conquest. The whole country had contributed to the expedition. Cleveland, O., furnished the iron plates for the tower; Pittsburg sent steel and machinery; South Carolina supplied the enormous yellow-pine timbers for the caisson; Washington provided two great barge-loads of stone; and New York City contributed hundreds of tons of Portland cement and sand and gravel, it being cheaper to bring even such supplies from the North than to gather them on the shores of the bay.
Everything necessary to the completion of the lighthouse and the maintenance of the eighty-eight men was loaded aboard ship. And quite a fleet it made as it lay out on the bay in the warm spring sunshine. The flagship was a big, double-deck steamer, 200 feet over all, once used in the coastwise trade. She was loaded close down to her white lines, and men lay over her rails in double rows. She led the fleet down the bay, and two tugs and seven barges followed in her wake like a flock of ducklings. The steamer towed the caisson at the end of a long hawser.
In three days the fleet reached the lighthouse site. During all of this time the sea had been calm, with only occasional puffs of wind, and the builders planned, somewhat exultantly, to drop the caisson the moment they arrived.
But before they were well in sight of the point, the sea awakened suddenly, as if conscious of the planned surprise. A storm blew up in the north, and at sunset on the tenth of April the waves were washing over the top of the iron cylinder and slapping it about like a boy's raft. A few tons of water inside the structure would sink it entirely, and the builder would lose months of work and thousands of dollars.