Barnegat Light

Barnegat Lighthouse was commissioned on January 1, 1859, and the borough it stands in was called Barnegat City until a 1948 referendum renamed it Barnegat Light. The borough's history page gives the tower 217 steps and credits its design to George Meade. The beam, dark since 1944, was relit on January 1, 2009, the page says. The lighthouse's original first-order lens is in the Barnegat Light Museum, a former one-room schoolhouse that held classes until 1951 and was dedicated as the museum in 1954.

The town began in 1881 with the Barnegat City Improvement Company, whose plan still sets the street and lot layout. Barnegat City seceded from Long Beach Township in 1904. The borough owns its beaches and dunes. Its 2018 master plan re-examination says it purchased all of the oceanfront land after the 1962 storm and calls the boat docks at Viking Village a critical component of the borough's economy. Viking Village says Norwegian fishermen founded it in the 1920s as the Independent Fish Company, then primarily a lobster fishing co-op. The 2020 census counted 640 residents and 1,257 housing units in the borough.