With GPS mapping technology able to pinpoint an exact location most anywhere in the world, it’s a long stretch back to the era when a beam of light piercing the inky night sky was all that stood between a ship and the jagged rocks along the shoreline.

Lighthouses have provided that gleam of hope since the third century B.C., when Egyptians constructed the world’s first lighthouse at Pharos, an island near Alexandria. Early lighthouses used bonfires for illumination, and later oil lamps with wicks, which required constant tending. In 1822, French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel invented a type of prismatic lens capable of transmitting light for 20 miles or more; the ingenious and powerful Fresnel lens was widely deployed in lighthouses. The advent of electricity, beginning in the late 1800s, brought lighthouses into the modern era and eventually enabled automation, putting an end to the seemingly romantic but actually arduous job of lighthouse keeper.

Today, the United States boasts more lighthouses than any other nation, but many of our historic—and in many cases beautiful—lighthouses are endangered by weather, deferred maintenance, tight budgets or a combination of all three. The U.S. Coast Guard, which oversees them, has decommissioned nearly 50 unneeded beacons over the past decade.
The good news is that the lights’ plight has given rise to dozens of local, state and national groups whose mission is to preserve the historic structures. In other words, lighthouses have fan clubs.

“The tide is turning for the better for lighthouse preservation,” asserts Jeff Gales, executive director of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, a nonprofit based at the Point No Point Light Station in Hansville, Washington. Gales notes that since the passage of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000, which established a process for decommissioning lighthouses and offering them first to organizations that will preserve the structures and open them to the public, the prospects are rosier for lighthouses that the Coast Guard deems surplus. “When people are passionate about the preservation of a lighthouse,” says Gales, “they have a way of making things happen.”

Take the Bodie Island Lighthouse, a structurally endangered tower near Nags Head, North Carolina. The Outer Banks Lighthouse Society worked for 15 years to save it; those efforts paid off in 2009 when the federal government committed more than $3 million to restore the beacon. Work should be completed in spring 2012.

An even more dramatic example is Florida’s Cape St. George Lighthouse, which collapsed into the Gulf of Mexico in 2005. Experts figured that was the end of the 153-year-old beacon, but the St. George Lighthouse Association, an organization of local supporters, disagreed. The pieces of the tower were salvaged; more than 22,000 bricks were cleaned by volunteers, and the lighthouse was relocated safely inland, rebuilt to exact historic specifications and opened to visitors in December 2008.

What inspires that kind of passion? It turns out that while many lighthouses may be functionally obsolete, they are no less precious or relevant than when they represented the latest in navigational technology. Having survived raging storms as well as the daily wear and tear that comes with a waterfront location, America’s historic lighthouses stand as signposts to an earlier era, witness to countless dark nights when a lone figure huddled in a tower, trimming the wick to keep the flame burning bright. Today, lighthouses invite visitors of all ages and interests to climb their old steps, gaze out over the water and feel a hundred years of history drop away. Last time I checked, my GPS didn’t offer that sort of magic.