The menhaden fishing industry continued to grow and to advance with the times. It brought prosperity to the lower Northern Neck. Reedville became an important menhaden fishing center and fishing port.
Eventually menhaden became the biggest fishery in America.
About 1868 the tower lighthouse on Smith Point was condemned by the government as unfit for use. At that time a new lighthouse of the screw pile type was built two and one-half miles offshore from Smith Point.
After the tower was condemned the keeper's house on the government reservation was rented to various tenants. In summer the Point became a social center for the neighborhood. Carriages, road-carts, and perhaps even ox-carts tied up at Tranquility, the nearest farmhouse, on a Sunday afternoon, and their occupants strolled up the beach with their picnic baskets.
The breakwater some distance out in the water from Smith Point was a favorite fishing spot, but the high point of any trip there in those days was a climb to the top of the condemned tower. The long, full skirts of the ladies of that era were hard to maneuver up the narrow spiral stairway.
The tower finally became too dangerous to enter. During an easterly storm in the spring of 1889 it crumbled in the night, so gently that the people living in the keeper's house didn't hear it fall.
The sandstone blocks lay there for many years and later generations knew them as "the old stone pile." Each year the sea took its toll of the Point until the land between the tower and the water, where "ten rows of corn" had once grown, finally disappeared completely. And then "the old stone pile" was swallowed by the persistent sea.
The keeper's house gradually deteriorated and then it too was claimed by the sea. For many years after, people of the region came at low tide and loaded their ox-carts and wagons with the stones and bricks. The stones were used for foundations of buildings and the bricks were used to line wells. Only the burial ground was left at Smith Point. There on the bank, "under the wide and starry sky," rest some of the early keepers of the light.
When the new lighthouse was built two-and-one-half miles offshore from Smith Point in 1868, it was manned by only two men. Shore leave or need for provisions meant a trip for one man in a small open sail boat, weather permitting, and a lonely watch for the man left behind.