The McClellanville Arts Council put out an unusual call this year. Not for lighthouse art in general, but specifically for depictions of the two Cape Romain lighthouses standing on Lighthouse Island, seven miles offshore. Paintings, old family photographs, sculptures, heirlooms in any medium were all welcome, so long as they showed those two towers and no others. Submissions closed June 1, and the show opens this fall inside the Arts Council's building at the end of Pinckney Street. The date on the calendar that prompted all of it is January 2027, when the older tower turns two hundred.

Here's the part that makes the timing strange. The town preparing to paint a two-century-old lighthouse currently cannot walk to the top of either one. The internal staircase in the taller tower has deteriorated too far to climb safely, and even the crews trying to repair it need a temporary staircase bolted to the outside just to reach the lantern room. Whatever hangs on the gallery wall this fall will be more finished than the real thing.

A Street That Already Tells the Story

Pinckney Street does most of the explaining before anyone opens a history book. Walk its length and you pass the Village Museum at 401 Pinckney, started in 1999 by longtime director Bud Hill, with exhibits tracing the area from Sewee settlement through the growth of the shrimp docks. A short distance away sit the Arts Council's shop and the Pinckney Street Gallery, where local painters, photographers and jewelry makers sell work between classes and guided nature walks. Near the corner of Pinckney and Oak stands the Deerhead Oak, a live oak old enough that estimates of its age run from 1,000 to 1,500 years, and prominent enough that it appears on the town's official seal. Follow the street to the water and it ends at 405 Pinckney, the public boat landing, which happens to be the only lawful way onto Lighthouse Island.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. There is no private charter, no back way in. Everyone who has ever set foot on that island in the last several decades started at the same spot on the same street the Village Museum and the Arts Council sit on.

Two Lighthouses Because One Wasn't Enough

The reason there are two towers instead of one is a story about a light that failed at its own job. The first lighthouse went up in 1827, a brick tower with a whale-oil lamp meant to warn ships away from shoals that stretch seven to nine miles off the coast. It didn't work well enough. Shipwrecks kept being reported through the 1830s, and by the 1850s the newly formed U.S. Lighthouse Board decided the original light was too weak to trust. Congress appropriated money in 1853 and again in 1854 for a replacement, and a taller tower with a first-order Fresnel lens went into service in 1858, rising more than 150 feet above the marsh. Both towers are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Neither has functioned as a navigational aid since 1947, when modern buoys made them obsolete.

That history is what the Arts Council is asking artists to paint. Not a generic lighthouse silhouette, but a pair of specific towers with a specific reason for existing side by side.

An Exhibit With One Rule

The Arts Council's restriction, that only the actual Cape Romain lights count, forces every contributor to work from firsthand experience of the island or from someone else's account of it. Most people in McClellanville have never climbed either tower. The show is being built almost entirely out of memory, inherited photographs and the view from a boat deck.

Why the Top Has Been Closed for Years

The staircase problem sits inside the newer tower. The Cape Romain Lighthouse Preservation Society describes the original cast-iron spiral staircase as deteriorated beyond safe use, which blocks conservation crews from reaching the lantern room at the top, not just casual visitors. The Society is currently raising money for what it calls a one-time project: a temporary stair tower built onto the outside of the 1858 lighthouse, solely so specialists can get up to do real repair work. Until that staircase gets built and paid for, guests on the rare public tours are limited to the first level of the tower.

This isn't a problem the town just discovered. In 2011, a McClellanville contractor named Tommy Graham made emergency repairs to secure the lantern room, work meant to buy time rather than fix things permanently. Fifteen years later, the same staircase is still the obstacle, now tied to a fundraising campaign the Preservation Society is trying to finish before the bicentennial arrives.

The Boat Ride That Still Runs a Handful of Times a Year

Getting to the island at all means booking one of the small number of trips the Sewee Visitor and Environmental Education Center in Awendaw runs each year with Coastal Expeditions, departing from that same boat landing at the end of Pinckney Street. Published counts of how many trips happen in a given year don't fully agree, some list four, others six, which says less about conflicting records than about how rarely the trip runs at all.

What's consistent across sources:

• The tour costs $75 per person and runs 3.5 to 4 hours
• The crossing covers roughly 6 miles of estuary, about a 45-minute boat ride each way
• There's no dock on the island, so reaching dry ground means crossing open marsh on foot, old sneakers or muck boots recommended
• Once ashore, guests can walk to both lighthouses, though only the first level of the taller tower is open

The tour itself starts on land, with a history presentation at the Sewee Center before the group drives to the McClellanville boat landing and boards the Coastal Expeditions ferry for the crossing.

A Tradition of Getting There Anyway

Limited access to the island isn't a new complaint. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, McClellanville villagers held what were called Cape Parties on Lighthouse Island, boating out to play games, swim, fish and roast crabs and oysters on the beach. Getting to that stretch of sand has always taken effort and a boat. What's changed is how much of the island people could actually reach once they arrived. A Cape Party guest a hundred years ago could likely still climb both towers. A visitor on this year's tour cannot.

The fall exhibit, in that light, isn't just marking two hundred years since a lighthouse first lit up over dangerous shoals. It's marking a stretch of years where the towers have been more visible from a distance than they've been open to anyone standing at their base.

The show will open on Pinckney Street sometime this fall, built from paintings and photographs of a place most of its contributors have only seen from a boat rail. The lighthouse itself will still be seven miles out, waiting on a fundraising campaign to finish the staircase that would let anyone, specialist or otherwise, walk all the way to the top again.

Want to know when the fall show opens at the Pinckney Street gallery, or when Coastal Expeditions posts next year's sailing dates? Perry Peace keeps an eye on McClellanville's small, specific news the way the town keeps an eye on its shrimp boats.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.