Meet the Ancestors: Eugene Burchanel
Gravestone of Eugene Burchenal in St. Anne’s Cemetery
Eugene Burchenal (1840-1881)
Eugene Burchenal was born on September 26, 1840. He enlisted in the Union Army as a private in the First Delaware Infantry Regiment on September 5, 1861, and was wounded at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. After almost a year in the hospital, he was discharged from the Army on September 15, 1863.
Ten years later, on November 4, he was assigned as the First Assistant Keeper at the Love Point Lighthouse with an annual salary of $420. He served at Love Point until November 4, 1875, when he was assigned to be the first Head Keeper at the Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse with an annual salary of $660. The light was first lit on November 27, 1875.
On January 14, 1877, the Bay froze over, and as many as 500 ships were forced to shelter around Annapolis. Several days later, as the air began to warm and a steady northwesterly wind blew in, the heavy ice flows began to move and slam into the screwpile base of the lighthouse, causing the cottage to lean over. With his assistant, Charles Miller, who lived there with his wife and teenage son, Burchenal worked feverishly to stabilize the cottage. They managed to lash down the stove, but a lamp turned over and fuel spilled across the floor. As the angle of the cottage increased, the clapper on the fog horn lay uselessly against the bell, and on January 16, the station’s Fresnel lens, weighing more than 500 pounds, fell off its base and was damaged. Undeterred, Burchenal and Miller rigged a replacement light in the window. But by the next day, Burchenal determined that it was too dangerous to stay in the cottage and began to prepare to evacuate. They loaded their equipment into one of the station’s tenders and safely maneuvered the boat through a moving field of drift ice until they reached the shore of the Thomas Point Peninsula, about a mile west of the lighthouse. There, they reopened the abandoned old stone lighthouse, climbed up into the tower, and lit the lamp at its top. In a postscript to a letter he had started earlier, Burchenal wrote, “January 18th, the captain left the lighthouse at 4:00 p.m. This afternoon started the light at the old light station on shore. Tonight will keep a light there until ordered to discontinue.”
Eugene resigned as Head Keeper of Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse in 1880 and died at the age of 41 on March 31, 1881. He had never married and had no children. His grave is on the hillside overlooking College Creek at St. Anne’s Cemetery.
The information in this article about the storm was taken from an article in Proptalk/ Chesapeake-Bay-Boating, December 17, 2020. It is an excerpt from “Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse: A Chesapeake Bay Icon” by Dave Gendell