The fascinating stories behind 6 Florida lighthouses

From the Panhandle down to the Keys, Florida lighthouses illuminate the state with rich, centuries-old history.

With more than 1,800 miles of coastline, the Sunshine State boasts dozens of lighthouses whose bright lights continue to provide safe passage to ships, as well as charm the heart of any visitor who crosses their path.

Florida contains 30 historical lighthouses—including some of the nation’s oldest and tallest. Some have withstood fierce hurricane winds; others saw gruesome skirmishes between Native Americans and European settlers. Today, nearly all of them are accompanied by museums, nature parks, or both.

From the southernmost tip of Florida to the Forgotten Coast on the Panhandle, here are Florida’s lighthouses with the most fascinating histories.

1. Key West Lighthouse

The Key West Lighthouse was constructed in 1825, about three years after Florida became an American territory. In its first years, the lighthouse was overseen by a pilot named Michael Mabrity. That is, until he succumbed to yellow fever, leaving his wife, Barbara, then his lighthouse operations assistant and mother of their six children, with a lighthouse to keep. The United States Coast Guard’s first female lighthouse service keeper expertly kept the light during ruinous hurricanes that hit Key West in 1835, 1841, and 1842, but during the Great Havana Hurricane of 1846, Mabrity experienced a brush with death while on duty. The category 5 storm blew the roofs off every home in Key West’s 600-house settlement and drowned the foundation of the lighthouse. Mabrity managed to escape just before the lighthouse toppled over, but nearly a dozen of the settlers who sought refuge in the structure weren’t so lucky.

2. Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park and Lighthouse

Just off Miami’s coast on the southernmost tip of Key Biscayne, the Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park and Lighthouse is visited by tens of thousands of people each year who swim, bike, hike, picnic, and fish under Miami-Dade County’s oldest original structure. Back when it was built in 1825, it was the Cape Florida lighthouse, so named by Ponce de Leon, who led Spain’s first invasion into Florida in 1513. It was burned to the ground by Seminoles resisting occupation in 1836, rebuilt in 1846, and subsequently served as a method of exposing and preventing enslaved peoples from seeking freedom on board Bahamian vessels. In 2004, Cape Florida Lighthouse was designated a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Site. 

3. Cape St. George Lighthouse

The fact that the Cape St. George Light still stands is a testament to the love Floridians have for this piece of Forgotten Coast history. Located in the center of St. George Island, a tiny swath of land across the Apalachicola Bay from the mainland Panhandle, the Cape St. George Light was built in 1833 to welcome ships into the thriving economic port of Apalachicola. The first lighthouse sustained storm damage and was dismantled to build a new tower in 1848, but that lighthouse became a mess of matchsticks following a hurricane in 1851, so a third structure was erected in 1852. This one stood triumphant for 153 years before it succumbed to beach erosion and collapsed in 2005. Undeterred by the forces of nature, a local team of contractors and volunteers utilized remaining pieces of the lighthouse to restore it to its original glory. On December 1, 2008, the Cape St. George Light re-opened to the public, and it’s frequently used as a scenic backdrop for weddings and other ceremonial gatherings.

4. Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse

Today, it marks the peaceful spot where the Halifax River meets the Ponce de Leon Inlet, not far from New Smyrna Beach on Florida’s east coast, but back when it was constructed in the mid-1880s, it was a project mired by danger and death. More than once, plans to construct the 175-foot lighthouse—the tallest lighthouse in the Sunshine State and the nation’s second-tallest brick lighthouse—grinded to a halt when its builders drowned in the inlet, then known as the Mosquito Inlet and named for the tiny but mighty bugs that brought a “sickly season” of malaria to the area each summer. Nevertheless, construction was completed in 1887, and the lighthouse’s lens beamed light 20 miles out to sea. Nearly a century later, the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse Preservation Association formed to restore the property as a museum, and in 1972, the lighthouse was named to the National Register of Historic Places.

5. Jupiter Lighthouse

The oldest standing structure in Palm Beach County, the Jupiter Lighthouse was constructed over a period of eight years, and it was first illuminated on July 10, 1860. The lighthouse was ordered to be built back in 1852 by the Florida Lighthouse Board, who recommended it be located where the Loxahatchee River empties into the Atlantic Ocean — the scene of countless shipwrecks due to offshore shoals, submerged reefs, and sandbars. Designed by U.S. Major George G. Meade, the Union general who went on to defeat General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg, the lighthouse featured a state-of-the-art lens: a Fresnel, shipped all the way from Paris, which created a fixed white light and a bright flash every 90 seconds. Designing such a forward-thinking structure wasn’t cheap: according to the Jupiter History Committee, the final cost to build the Jupiter Lighthouse was nearly $61,000, almost doubling the project budget approved by the U.S. Congress. In 1910, the lighthouse received a bright-red paint job, and today it functions as a museum open to visitors year-round. 

6. St. Augustine Lighthouse

The history of the St. Augustine Lighthouse begins more than 400 years ago, as a 1586 map of St. Augustine drawn by an Italian cartographer features a small-statured tower resting on the tip of Anastasia Island, presumably a wooden watchtower erected by the Spanish to deter other nations’ ships from the area. In 1737, the Spanish debuted a new, more sturdy watchtower carved from wood and coquina, a soft limestone composed of broken seashells. When the Spanish, as well as French, colonists were defeated by British forces in 1763, St. Augustine became the capital of East Florida and a territory of the British empire. The Brits quickly got to work to increase the watchtower’s height, but its wood-and-coquina foundation couldn’t last – the 165-foot lighthouse current visitors know and love was erected from scratch in 1874, and today the structure and its surrounding land are managed by the non-profit organization St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum.

This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.