But the Civil War intervened. With the threat of Union takeover, the Confederate troops moved the Lightship upstream to thwart navigational efforts. When threat of the “USS Ram Albemarle” loomed, the soldiers sank the lightship and several other crafts in the river to serve as a blockade against the deep-water vessel.

After the Civil War ended, plans began for a more permanent river marker. The Lighthouse Board commissioned the building of a screwpile lighthouse, which was completed in 1866. But the lighthouse did not survive long before it succumbed to fire. Its replacement was dumped into the ocean when heavy ice flows severed two of the iron pilings.

By 1887, workers had re-built the lighthouse, placing it again on pilings that were screwed into the muddy ocean floor. The fixed white fourth order Fresnel lens remained in service until it was decommissioned in the 1940s. For more than a decade after that, the lighthouse was dark, hosting only Sea Scout troop meetings and clandestine card games. 

Then in 1955 a maritime salvager, Emmett Wiggins, loaded the lighthouse onto a barge and moved it inland near Edenton, where it remains to this day. Wiggins lived in the sentinel and occasionally lighted the lens, but now the beacon is privately owned and no longer in operation.

At one time, the Washington County Historical Society hoped to acquire the structure and move it to Plymouth to serve as a Maritime Museum, but that plan was scrapped when the owner died, just before signing over the deed. As an alternative, the group initiated a plan for a replica of the light station to be re-built downtown. The reconstruction of the Roanoke River Light will be greatly enhanced by the recent discovery of the original architectural plans recovered from archives by the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society.