Photograph of Sapelo Island Light — Photograph by Bubba73 (Jud McCranie), CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Sapelo Island Lighthouse

Built in 1820. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

From the record

“Sapelo Island Lighthouse is a lighthouse in Georgia, United States, near the southern tip of Sapelo Island. It is the nation's second-oldest brick lighthouse and the oldest survivor among lighthouses designed by Winslow Lewis.”
Wikipedia article Sapelo Island Light, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 10 National Register listings published here for McIntosh County · listed in 1997 · category: District · built in 1820, by Winslow Lewis.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

Address. S end of Sapelo Island, S of University of Georgia Marine Institute, Sapelo Island, 31327
When was it listed? August 1997
Category. district
Census division. Darien
When was it built? 1820
Architect. Winslow Lewis
National Register reference number. 97000335 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Fires near this property

21 since 1993

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 21 fires within 5 miles of Sapelo Island Lighthouse between 1993 and 2015, burning about 2,609 acres in total. 12 started naturally. 3 were recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Natural	12
Arson/incendiarism	3
Debris and open burning	3
Smoking	2
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
7 September 1999	Natural	under an acre	Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge	BARNARD#1
29 August 1995	Natural	under an acre	Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge	BLB-NO2
20 August 2010	Natural	651 acres	Georgia Forestry Commission	FY2011-MCINTOSH-002
14 August 2013	Natural	under an acre	Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge	GHOST
11 August 1999	Natural	under an acre	Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge	JOHNSON
5 July 2014	Natural	242 acres	Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge	WILDERNESS 14 FIRE
3 July 1996	Arson/incendiarism	3.0 acres	Georgia Forestry Commission	not named
3 July 1996	Arson/incendiarism	1.5 acres	Georgia Forestry Commission	not named

Every fire recorded in McIntosh County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

4 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Property	Distance	Listed
Behavior Cemetery	0.5 miles	1996
Hog Hammock Historic District	1.2 miles	1996
First African Baptist Church at Raccoon Bluff	3.5 miles	1996
Ridge, The	7.6 miles	1985

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 97000335 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
McIntosh County	All 10 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.