 In 1804, the United States Congress passed a statute requiring the secretary of the treasury to build a lighthouse at Five Mile Point if land could be obtained for a reasonable price.That same year, Amos Morris, Jr., son of the man whose home was the first to be razed during the 1779 British invasion, sold a suitable one-acre plot of his father's coastal estate to the federal government for $100.On March 16, 1805, an appropriation for $2500 was issued for the construction of the lighthouse.