Morris Island Lighthouse

The Morris Island Lighthouse is a 161-foot brick tower at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, and the reason people photograph it is that it is sitting in open water, cut off from the island it was built on. It was deactivated in 1962 and has been closed to the public ever since. Nobody goes inside, and no tour boat ties up to it.

Seeing it is easy anyway. Drive to the east end of Folly Beach, walk about half a mile, and it is right there across the water. That view costs nothing.

Why it's standing in the water

This is the whole story of the site, and it is a man-made one. When the tower was finished in 1876 it sat roughly 1,200 feet inland from the water's edge, with keepers' houses, outbuildings and a cistern around it.

Two years later the Army Corps of Engineers started building the Charleston Harbor jetties, two long rock walls designed to funnel the tide and scour a deep shipping channel into the harbor. The work took until the 1890s. It did what it was meant to do for shipping, and it also changed how sand moved along the coast. Morris Island began washing away.

By 1938 the water had reached the base of the tower. The Lighthouse Service automated the light that year and pulled the keepers off, and the dwellings went. The light was switched off for good in 1962, replaced by the Charleston Light on Sullivan's Island, a triangular 1962 tower that most visitors never notice. Save the Light describes the Morris Island tower today as about 2,000 feet offshore.

Three lighthouses on the same spot

The current tower is the third. The colony of South Carolina put up the first brick lighthouse here in 1767 to guide ships into the harbor. A replacement went up in 1838, a 102-foot revolving light built for heavier shipping traffic. Confederate forces destroyed it in 1862 so Union ships could not navigate by it.

The rebuild was expensive. The 1876 tower cost $149,993.50 and was the tallest lighthouse in South Carolina at 161 feet. Its foundation is 264 timber piles driven into the sand with eight feet of concrete poured between them, which is the part now doing the hardest work. An 1885 cyclone and the 1886 Charleston earthquake both cracked it, and it was repaired both times.

Who owns it, and what has been done to save it

The federal government auctioned the lighthouse off in 1965 to a private buyer who wanted to fold it into a campground. That never happened, and the tower spent three decades deteriorating in private hands.

Save the Light, Inc. formed as a nonprofit in 1998 and bought the lighthouse in February 1999 for $75,000, backed by financial guarantees from the artist Jim Booth and businessman Robert New. In December 2000 the title was transferred to the State of South Carolina, with a 99-year lease that leaves Save the Light responsible for preservation. It is a volunteer-run group funded by donations and by two annual fundraisers on Folly, an oyster roast and a 5K.

The engineering has been the hard part. In 2008 crews finished a 72-foot-wide circular steel cofferdam around the base, a wall that blocks the surf from the foundation and makes it possible to work in a dry space. A second phase completed in August 2010 stabilized the foundation, driving micropiles down to firmer marl and capping the area inside the cofferdam, at a reported cost of $734,313. Save the Light relit the tower on October 1, 2016, the 140th anniversary of its first illumination, with 16 solar-powered LED lamps. That is not a permanent working light, and the lamps come on for occasional events rather than every night.

The tower itself is still waiting. Masonry repairs, the interior stairs and railings, the lantern room glass and the corroded ironwork all remain to be done, and the group puts the full restoration bill near $7.75 million. Cofferdam repairs and repointing the lower third of the brick were slated to begin in spring 2026. Check savethelight.org for where the work stands now.

Seeing it free, from Folly Beach

The land view is at Lighthouse Inlet Heritage Preserve, at the far east end of Folly Island. Drive East Ashley Avenue until it dead-ends at a locked gate at 1750 E Ashley Ave. The gate stays locked, so you park short of it, either on the roadside or in the small paid beach-access lot nearby, and walk in.

From there it is about half a mile to the beach, most of it on the old paved road that locals have covered end to end in graffiti. The pavement gives out, you go up over the dunes, and the lighthouse is directly ahead across the inlet. The preserve is open during daylight hours and costs nothing to enter.

Practical notes that catch people out. Park with all four tires off the pavement or you will be ticketed, and street parking on the east end fills early on summer weekends. No pets are allowed in the preserve, which has no restrooms or lifeguards. Do not swim at the inlet: the current running between Folly and Morris Island is strong and the bottom drops off fast. Bring water and sun cover, because the walk is exposed the whole way.

One common mix-up worth heading off. Folly Beach County Park, at 1100 W Ashley Ave, is at the opposite, western end of the island. It is a good beach with parking, restrooms and lifeguards, and it is the wrong end for the lighthouse. See the Folly Beach guide for how the ends of the island differ.

Seeing it by boat

A boat gets you close enough to see the brick courses and the rust on the lantern room, and it is the only way to set foot on Morris Island. Nothing lands at the lighthouse itself, but several trips beach on the island and let you walk. Most run out of Folly Beach or Shem Creek and take two to three hours.

Four are worth knowing by name. The Morris Island Lighthouse Eco-Boat Tour is the cheapest way out, rated 5.0 from 93 reviews at $52. The Morris Island Dolphin Cruise with Beachcombing rates 5.0 from 38 reviews at $110 and builds in time ashore for shells and shark teeth. The Morris Island Nature Boat Tour with Naturalist rates 4.9 from 12 reviews at $55 and puts a guide on board who can name what you are looking at. The Folly Beach Morning Dolphin Boat Trip to Morris Island rates 4.7 from 21 reviews at $65 and leaves early, when the water is flattest and dolphins are feeding.

Compare departure points and what each trip includes on our Charleston dolphin tour guide; the wider water activities guide covers the harbor cruises and kayak trips that pass the lighthouse at a distance.

Morris Island itself

The island behind the lighthouse is 840 acres of sand, marsh and scrub with nobody on it. There is no bridge and no dock. The City of Charleston bought it in 2008 for $3 million in a deal brokered by the Trust for Public Land, with deed restrictions that prohibit development, and Charleston County Parks oversees it.

It was the bloodiest ground in the Charleston campaign. On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the Black regiment portrayed in Glory, led the dusk assault on Battery Wagner under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw was killed on the parapet. Union losses across the attack ran to roughly 1,515. The Confederates held the fort through 60 days of shelling and evacuated the island on September 7, 1863.

Nothing of Battery Wagner is left to see. The sand it was built on has washed away entirely, and the site is under water offshore. If you want the Civil War harbor story with something physical attached to it, Fort Sumter is the trip that still has walls.

What Morris Island does have is beachcombing. The same currents that took the island apart bring fossilized shark teeth and shells onto its beach, and because you can only reach it by boat, it does not get picked over the way Folly does.

Is it worth it?

Go for the free walk if you like empty beaches and do not mind a mile of round-trip walking on sand and cracked pavement. The east end of Folly is genuinely quiet, the graffiti road is odd and photogenic, and the payoff at the end is a 150-year-old lighthouse standing alone in the surf. Sunrise is the good light, since you are facing roughly east and northeast.

Skip the walk if you have small kids who will melt down, limited mobility, or only an hour to spare. The route has no shade and nowhere to sit or use a bathroom, and from the beach the lighthouse reads as a distant silhouette rather than a building. Plenty of visitors get their photo from a harbor cruise instead and feel no loss.

Take the boat if the lighthouse is the actual point of your day rather than a bonus. At $52 to $110 it is priced like a dolphin cruise, you get the tower at close range, and you get an island most visitors never set foot on. If you are counting dollars, note that the shore view is one of the better entries on the free things to do in Charleston list.

Getting there and what's nearby

Folly Beach is about 12 miles from downtown Charleston, 25 to 35 minutes by car depending on traffic on Folly Road. Cross onto the island, turn left at the light onto East Ashley Avenue, and follow it east until it ends. There is no bus service to the east end and rideshare pickups out there can be slow, so a car is the sane choice.

Make a day of it rather than a stop. Center Street on Folly has the restaurants, the fishing pier and the surf shops, and the rest of the island's beach is a few blocks in either direction. Compare it with the other barrier islands on the Charleston beaches guide, or see what else is worth building a day around on the Charleston attractions page.