Delmarva Back Roads

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 ...