History of lighthouses with demands, and to the loss of a number of ships, most notably the Dutch merchant ship Vreede in 1800 with the loss of 380 lives. After the reforms of the Lighthouse Act 1836, owners still managed to collect large dues, of which the largest were for the Smalls Lighthouse which collected £23,000 in 1852 and Trinity House was forced to spend over £1m in buying back leases, including £444,000 for the Skerries Lighthouse. The modern era of lighthouses began at the turn of the 18th century, as lighthouse construction boomed in lockstep with burgeoning levels of transatlantic commerce. Advances
Cape Romain Lighthouses for 19 miles. Just three years after the lighthouse was completed, the Civil War began, and lighthouses along the Atlantic Coast went dark. The light at Cape Romain was restored in 1866. On August 31, 1886, “The keeper was in his house when the shock came. A gradually increasing rumbling ‘sounding something like a battery of artillery or a troop of cavalry crossing a long bridge,’ was heard before the shock. In less than a minute came the shocks, the first one lasting about two minutes, the next one as long and at about two minute intervals. The shocks did