Liston Range Lighthouses: A Lesson in River Navigation
While Peter Stuyvesant was able to navigate the Kalmar Nychel up the Delaware River to Wilmington in 1638, the river is not deep enough to accommodate modern ships. Since 1885 a channel dug into the center of the river has been used by large ships going to Wilmington and Philadelphia.
If you’ve ever seen a map of the Delaware River, you know it isn’t straight—there are several sharp bends. Before modern satellites and GPS, it would have been hard to navigate around these bends and stay in the channel. So lighthouses were installed at key points along the river to help guide ships.
Sometimes navigating the channel was so difficult that one lighthouse wasn’t enough. Two were needed: a short one on the coast and a second, taller one inland. When the lights of the two lighthouses lined up vertically, one on top of the other, the ship was in the channel. These pairs of lighthouses are called range lighthouses.
The Liston Range Lighthouses are an example of this. The Liston Rear Range Lighthouse is three miles inland on Port Penn Road, west of Port Penn near DE Route 1 (you can see it from Route 1). It’s made of wrought iron and is the tallest remaining lighthouse in Delaware.
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| Liston Rear Range Lighthouse |
It was built in 1876-1878 as the Port Penn Rear Range Lighthouse, then moved here around 1906.
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| Doorway of the Liston Rear Range Lighthouse, showing the date |
Next to the lighthouse is an oil house made of enameled brick, I’m guessing to store oil to power the light.
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| Liston Rear Range Lighthouse Oil House |
The Liston Front Range Lighthouse, near the Silver Run Tract of Augustine Wildlife Area, is the last wood frame lighthouse in Delaware and may be the prettiest. Unfortunately, it’s in Bay View Beach, a private community closed to the public, so you can’t see it from land.
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| Bay View Beach entrance marked "PRIVATE" |
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| Liston Front Range Lighthouse |
LighthouseFriends.com has wonderful articles on the Liston Front Range Lighthouse and the Liston Rear Range Lighthouse. The article on the Liston Front Range Lighthouse includes a great story. I’ve always wondered where the Delaware River becomes the Delaware Bay. It turns out that in 1905 some people decided that burning question had to be answered! They chose a spot and erected granite monuments marking the mouth of the Delaware River on the Delaware and New Jersey shorelines. Eventually the monuments’ pilings collapsed and the monuments toppled, but in 1983 they were re-erected on new pilings. Maybe someday we’ll be able to enter Bay View Beach and see the monument.
UPDATE 12/29/2020:
We were able to spot the Liston Front Range Lighthouse from Route 9! As you drive north on Route 9 from Odessa. you'll enter the Silver Run Tract of Augustine Wildlife Area. As you cross the bridge over Silver Run, look northeast and you'll see it in the distance. Look quickly! The lighthouse is mostly hidden by trees. The only place to pull over is right after crossing the bridge.
UPDATE 8/20/2021: I received the following message from one of my blog readers (I don't share names to protect privacy):
"My husband and I owned the Liston Front Range lighthouse and used it as a weekend and vacation house for some years. His grandfather was the last keeper of the original Liston lighthouse which was just up the road on Rte 9. There’s a National Register plaque where it stood. The keeper of the existing Liston lighthouse was Harry Spencer, who lived til almost 100, eventually became one of my patients, and lived in Lewes. He used to make miniatures of the lighthouse and of local birds, which were adorable.
"We gave self guided tours of the lighthouse when we owned it, and on any given day we could look out the back door and see a couple of heads peering into the hallway, hoping to be let in. The people came from all over the world.
"My husband also used to stand out by the flagpole and holler at the Annapolis students who came up the Bay in their boats on their practice maneuvers because he was a West Pointer and couldn’t behave."
She also confirmed how that the front and rear range lighthouses worked exactly like they're supposed to:
"Another neat story I tell is of the huge tankers that come up the bay to go into the [Delaware River shipping channel]. When we would be up in the front room upstairs, at the moment it seemed the tanker was going to run into the house, because all you could see from the window if you were sitting down was sky and the ship, our Liston Front range light would line up with the Liston Rear range light for them and the ship would turn on a dime and glide right into the [channel]!"
I found an online nautical map that confirms that, coming up from the southeast ,the Delaware River shipping channel does head straight for the Liston Front Range Lighthouse. The channel then turns right to continue north up the Delaware River.
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