Cape May Lighthouse

Ships have needed warning off this corner of New Jersey for two centuries, because the meeting of the Atlantic and Delaware Bay throws up shoals and hard currents right where vessels turn for the busy ports up the bay. The first known light here went up in 1823, and the second followed in 1847, but the same restless sand and sea that made the point dangerous also undid the towers. The shoreline moved, the water advanced, and both early lighthouses were eventually lost, one of them now well offshore beneath the waves.

The Army Corps of Engineers built the present tower in 1859, learning from the failures before it. They set it farther back from the water and raised a tapering brick cylinder over 150 feet tall, with a double-wall construction and a graceful cast-iron stair spiraling up the inside. That care is why it is still here and still working more than 160 years later, long after its two predecessors surrendered to the sea.

For its first decades the lighthouse ran on the labor of resident keepers, who lived in the dwellings at its base and carried oil up the stairs to feed the lamp, trimming wicks and polishing the great lens through the night so the beam never failed. One of the original keepers' houses still stands and now serves the state park, a plain, sturdy reminder of the round-the-clock work a seacoast light demanded.

The beacon was electrified in 1933 and automated in 1946, which ended the age of the live-in keeper but kept the light burning. Today it flashes on a timer as a working aid to navigation. Visitors climb the same iron staircase the keepers did, 199 steps winding up the tapering brick shaft to the watch gallery, where the wind and the wide view over ocean, bay, and beach town make the effort worth every stair.

The lighthouse marks more than a hazard to shipping. Cape May Point is one of the most famous bird-migration funnels on the continent, because millions of southbound birds follow the coast until it runs out here at the tip of New Jersey, then pause before crossing the open water of Delaware Bay. In autumn the skies above the tower fill with hawks, falcons, songbirds, and clouds of orange monarch butterflies riding the same route south.

A hawk-watch platform in the surrounding state park counts the raptors as they stream past, and birders come from all over to stand where the light stands and watch the season pour overhead. It gives the place a double character: a piece of maritime history you can climb, set in the middle of one of the great living spectacles of the East Coast.

The lighthouse rises inside Cape May Point State Park at the southern tip of New Jersey, a short drive from the Victorian center of Cape May town. It is cared for by a local nonprofit and opens for climbing on a seasonal schedule, fullest in the warm months and thinner in winter, so it is worth checking the days and hours before making the trip. The climb up and back is the main event, but it is not a place to rush.

Give yourself time to pair the tower with the free state park around it. Walk the pond and dune trails, stand on the hawk-watch platform, and step onto the beach where the ocean and the bay meet. Come in fall for the migration at its height, or in the quieter shoulder seasons for the same big view with room to breathe. Either way, you leave having climbed one of America's oldest working lighthouses at the place where New Jersey finally runs into the sea.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.