Towers of Strength
The WWII fire control towers on our shores were built to defend industry upriver. Now they guard local history.
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Three young men stand on the Dewey Beach shore, basking in the sun, mindlessly tossing rocks onto the sand and occasionally pointing to the mysterious edifices towering in the distance. In between, they talk, speculate.
“They were fire towers, for spotting fires,” one says.
“Maybe they were, like, missile silos or something,” says another.
The young men aren’t from around here—at least not the beach. They’re Delawareans, all three of them, but none knows what to make of the concrete cylinders that rise from the sand from Cape Henlopen State Park down the coast to South Bethany.
From about 200 yards away, the towers look surreal, almost accidental, like someone very large and very powerful started to build something, forgot what he was doing, then stopped. Getting closer, the towers begin to take on a more determined character, with their foot-thick concrete walls, small observation slits about two-thirds of the way up and nondescript doors at their bases.
“My dad told me one time what these were,” says Steven Hao, of Wilmington. “But I forget.”
Farther down the shore, gazing intently at Tower 3 off Tower Road, two women stare at the building. They are as perplexed as the men.
“I’ve never seen them before,” says Mary Jaster, of Pennsylvania. It’s her first visit to the region, so she’s equal parts puzzled and enthralled. “Maybe they were fire towers or…”
“Why would they need fire towers on the beach?” says Jaster’s friend, Lydia Hilton, 39, of Philadelphia. “I heard they were lookout towers for, you know, enemy ships and stuff.”
Plenty of people are interested, but few of them know.
“I hear it all,” says Dr. Gary Wray, president of the Fort Miles Historical Association and author of the book “Fort Miles.” As the state’s pre-eminent expert on the towers and their history, Wray has plenty to say—and plenty of enthusiasm.
“Some people think they were fire towers. Some think they were gun towers. Some have no idea,” he says. “But I know, and it’s really quite interesting.”
During the early years of World War II, Delaware’s coast was a valuable piece of maritime real estate. Just up the Delaware River were the DuPont chemical plants in Wilmington and the Navy Shipyard in Philadelphia, as well as 90 percent of the country’s oil-refining capacity. Because the only route up the Delaware Bay was through the narrow shipping channel guarded by Cape Henlopen, free and safe passage was crucial to Allied forces.
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