20 years ago, Cape Light's move a miracle of modern engineering

The "new lighthouse," lit in 1870, remains the tallest such beacon in the United States. It is the granddaddy of the lighthouses that line the Outer Banks.

Dexter Stetson, a ship builder from Massachusetts, was trusted with the task of securing the base of the Cape Light in the shifting sands. Having worked with wood in his shipbuilding, Stetson used wood to support all those bricks.

Lighthouse historian Bruce Roberts explains:

"He thought back to about his days in the shipyard, and he knew that if you had wood and you kept it in fresh water, bathed in fresh water, it would remain forever in perfect condition.

"And when you got down four feet in Hatteras, you were into fresh water. So you hold those pine timbers down under the fresh water with the piles of rocks and that becomes your foundation."

"How in the world has this thing managed to stand that way? It worked," Roberts said. "They were put there by a man who knew how to build ships as well as lighthouses."

Stetson himself explained his process in a letter that remains in the National Park Service archive. He wrote:

"I managed to get down nine feet by battering the head so that I could get it no farther. The foundation is about as good as I can make it. It is about the same all over and I shall cover the whole surface with timber doubled."

"It's amazing how well it's built, especially years ago," said construction foreman John Mitchell.

"The people who built this lighthouse were more than just craftsmen," stone mason Alex Skellon said.

Skellon, a mason from Scotland, was brought in to work on the move of the lighthouse in 1999, away from an encroaching Atlantic Ocean.

After 120 years, the light built a quarter mile from the sea's reach had seen that buffer shrink to just about 100 feet. The solitary sentinel, solid and strong amid the shifting sand and buffeting waves, faced a new threat. The land was eroding.

Over the decades, the Atlantic Ocean had ravenously swallowed up sand, bringing the breakers within feet of the lighthouse foundation. It set up a clash: Not only man against nature, but man against man, in determining the fate of the Cape Light.

Move it, or let Mother Nature have her way? The debate raged, black and white as the beacon itself.

Stan Riggs, a geologist at East Carolina University, was among those with a sense of urgency.

"It's insanity not to save it," he told WRAL News.

And to save the lighthouse, Riggs, said, it must be moved.

"It's destined to be gone, he said. "To continue to ignore that is insane. Get it the hell out of the way."

After the National Parks Service recommended the move as the best way to save the Cape Light, Congress approve almost $12 million for the project.

Long-time Outer Banks residents did not see it the same way. Mechanic Danny Couch was a vocal leader of the local opposition.

"We're going to run rods through it? We're going to take the inner staircase out? Why put the lighthouse through that," he said at the time. "Why not take that amount of money and use it to shore up the lighthouse where it is?"

Carol Dylan, owner of the Outer Banks motel, sensed a cockiness in those who planned the move.

"They just want to see if it can be done. They just don't work with nature," she said.

"The engineers guarantee us that they can move this tower safely," Riggs said. "I also know that if the ocean reaches the base of this tower, it's gone."

A team was formed, of engineers, steelworkers, stone masons, movers and many more. The plan was simple: Pick up the lighthouse, roll it down a track to a point of safety 2,900 feet away and 1,500 feet inland.

Steve Campbell, a graphic artist, put together a computer animation to demonstrate the process.

"They dig down to the bottom of the lighthouse," he described, "Put the lighthouse up on beams. They lift the lighthouse up and roll it down the track. ... It's a complicated process but all they want to do is pick it up move it."

"We started when the weather down there was very cold," said WRAL photographer Richard Adkins. "There was a lot of prep work. The wind was blowing, and it just slices through you. And it moved on to the summer months, with the heat and sand blowing and sticking to you, but even with those conditions, it beat anything else."

For weeks, the crew laid the groundwork for the massive move.

"When we first got there, they are just drilling, busting up rocks, setting the ground level for the move," said WRAL Chief Photographer Ed Wilson. "For a long time, they were doing the same thing day in and day out."

Despite the tedium, crowds gathered daily to watch, and WRAL photographers spent time talking to them along the fence line at the edge of the site.

"Man, when they started jacking the thing up and started moving it, there was nothing boring about it," Baker said.

"That was just historic, amazing, to see a spire that big actually moving," Wilson added.

It was stop-and-go, over a period of 23 days, as crews set and re-set the steel track for rollers which bore the lighthouse forward, five feet at a time.

On a set of rails greased by Ivory soap, they slowly and softly pushed the Cape Hatteras lighthouse away from the encroaching ocean to higher and safer ground.

"There were three sections of steel rails," Adkins recalled, "As the lighthouse would move from one to another, the rails were rebuilt after every push, after every section."

"It was constant motion," Adkins said.

Inside the tower, a plumb line hung from top to bottom, an old-school tool to tell after each incremental move whether the lighthouse was level. As they re-set the rails, workers rubbed on Ivory soap for lubrication.

"To think of the feat, to watch them cutting the rock and to wonder how this monstrous thing was not going to fall," Baker said. "They knew what they were doing."

They landed that lighthouse exactly where they wanted, and that is just amazing," Adkins said.

It was a red letter day – the heat the summer, the smell of the air, the caress of the wind – the day crews along the Outer Banks finished moving a massive lighthouse and popped a cork in celebration.

To the amazement of many, The Move of the Millennium, as it was nicknamed, worked perfectly.

Fears had been raised that the lighthouse, built in 1870, could not survive the move – that the structure would crack and its more than one million bricks would fall apart during the move. Those fears were unfounded. There was not one crack. Not one brick was lost.

Mission impossible became mission accomplished. It was a 23-day miracle of modern engineering.