Dale Mutro’s pink-and-teal Hawaiian shirt is a bright spot behind the check-in desk at The Anchorage Inn overlooking Silver Lake Harbor. The bold shirt suits the colorful postmaster turned hotel receptionist. “I love local history,” he says. “I have these episodes where I get almost obsessed with it.” His obsessions have earned him a reputation as the unofficial island weatherman, the guy keeping his grandmother’s fig preserves alive, and, more recently, the Holmesian sleuth whose discovery solved a decades-long mystery.

“There’s a lot of stuff out there that we’ve been taught all these years, that we always thought was the gospel truth, that just ain’t correct,” Mutro says. “When the supposed 200th anniversary of the Ocracoke Lighthouse was approaching last year, I got a bee in my bonnet. Nobody’s ever known the exact lighting date of the lighthouse. The lighting date is sort of the birthday. It’s not a lighthouse ’til it’s lit.”

The missing date nagged at Mutro, a native “O’cocker” who was practically raised in the shadow of the 75-foot white brick tower. The oldest operating lighthouse on the Outer Banks was his playground. “I remember riding horses in the lighthouse enclosure,” he says. “There was an old red jeep out behind one of the buildings. We used to play in that as kids.” Decades later, he passes the lighthouse every day when he leaves the house that he grew up in and later inherited from his grandmother. The lighthouse is a constant reminder of his island heritage and a monument to the history of the place he calls home. But a piece of its history was missing. When was it lit?

Mutro had latched onto the lingering question and wasn’t letting go. “You probably think I’m crazy,” he says. “I live by the lighthouse, and some days I go by it a dozen times. I’d look over there and say to her, ‘My God, tell me something, will you, please?’”

A beacon for generations of islanders and seafarers, the Ocracoke Lighthouse long remained a mystery to those who wondered about its history. photograph by Chris Hannant

For several months, between welcomes and farewells at his post behind the Anchorage Inn desk, Mutro searched for an answer that had evaded National Park Service historians and researchers for years. “One day, I was digging online in the National Archives in D.C.,” he recalls. “I find this letter from the acting commissioner of revenue to Henry Dearborn, the collector of customs and superintendent of lighthouses. And there it was! In the letter: August 15, 1824. It was the smoking gun. I was over the moon.” The answer had been waiting to be found.

“It was just almost like divine intervention. I came into work that day, and I got on that computer,” Mutro says, gesturing to a desk a few feet away. “It was almost like I had a line tied to it. I went right straight to it. It’s just as if … it found me.”

He anticipated skepticism. He tracked down supporting evidence and took his findings to island historian Philip Howard. At a meeting of the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society and then with the National Park Service, Mutro presented his case. It was ironclad.

As he recounts the journey, his train of thought is interrupted by a guest checking out on their way to the ferry. He shifts his weight in his rolling desk chair and digs into his pocket. He rustles out a set of keys, and among the dozen pieces of jingling metal is a thumb drive. “It’s all on here,” he says, grinning. Mutro doesn’t know what mystery he’ll try to unlock next, but on the screen behind him is a blueprint of the Bodie Island Lighthouse. If history is any guide, another bee is heading for his bonnet.