The Hams Bluff Light Station was designed and constructed between 1913 and 1915 by the Danish government, responding to the maritime traffic the newly opening Panama Canal was expected to funnel through the waters between St. Thomas and St. Croix. The Directorate of the Danish Lighthouse Service purchased the site from J. W. Blackwood in 1912, originally encompassing some 22.5 acres and including two one-story keepers' dwellings at the base of the bluff.
The tower itself was built of cast iron on a concrete foundation — cylindrical, originally painted white with a black cupola — and positioned roughly 380 feet above the Caribbean on the western shoulder of Maroon Ridge. Its original gas lamp used a lens made by A. B. Lux of Denmark; that lens was replaced by a French Barbier, Bernard & Turenne optic in 1921, and again by an American Crouse-Hinds beacon in 1949.
With the Convention of Cession of the Danish West Indies in 1917, the light passed from Denmark to the United States Lighthouse Service, and later to the U.S. Coast Guard. Keepers manned the tower until it was automated on 7 February 1975; it was decommissioned in the mid-1990s, its duties assumed by a simple steel truss tower erected alongside.
The ridge on which the lighthouse stands — known locally as Maroonberg, or Maroon Ridge — is sacred ground in the history of the African-descended people of St. Croix. According to oral tradition preserved by local historians and educators, it was a stronghold of self-emancipated Africans until emancipation in 1848, a place of resistance and of freedom defended at great cost. The Maroon presence predates the lighthouse by more than a century and remains a living cultural memory. Any stewardship of this property treats the Maroon heritage of the ridge as inseparable from the built heritage of the lighthouse.
The Hams Bluff Light was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2019 (NRHP No. 100004382). The law, the community, and the landscape are aligned. The time to act is now.