Owner Comments:
Cape Hatteras Centennial Medal.
A commemorative medal marking the centennial of the completion of the current Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1970. The obverse of the piece features the Hatteras lighthouse at the center, with the Wright Brothers Memorial at Kitty Hawk flanking it to the left and an image of one of the sailing ships that brought North Carolina’s first settlers to the right. The reverse of the piece features a standing Ellinor Dare with the infant Virginia Dare in her arms as its central design element. Virginia Dare, of course, is known to history as the first child of English descent born in the New World. The design is very reminiscent of the reverse of the 1937 Roanoke Island commemorative half dollar.
The medal is 1.5-inches in diameter and was produced, at a minimum, in bronze and silver with an antiqued finish; strikes in other metals may have been produced.
Historical Note:
When completed in 1870, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was located a safe 1,500 feet from the ocean. Even then, however, storm-driven tides completely washed over Hatteras Island, eroding sand from the ocean side of the island and depositing it on the sound side. By 1970, this process, which has caused the gradual westward migration of the Outer Banks for at least the past 10,000 years, left the lighthouse just 120 feet from the ocean’s edge and almost certain destruction.
In 1999, the Cape Hatteras Light Station, which consists of seven historic structures, was successfully relocated 2,900 feet from the spot on which it had stood since 1870. Because of the threat of shoreline erosion, a natural process, the entire light station was safely moved to a new site where the historic buildings and cisterns were placed in spatial and elevational relationship to each other, exactly as they had been at the original site.