Jupiter Inlet: The Light That Was Buried in the Ground
Florida
The red lighthouse at Jupiter Inlet is one hundred and five feet tall and was first lit on July tenth, eighteen sixty. It took seven years to build, an unusually long time, because the Third Seminole War disrupted construction and the inlet kept silting over, stranding supply boats. The lighthouse was designed by Lieutenant George Meade of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, who selected this site in eighteen fifty-three. Ten years later Meade would command the Union Army at Gettysburg. He designed this tower before any of that.
The light guided ships through the dangerous offshore shoals that had claimed countless wrecks along this coast. A first-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in Paris, magnified a single flame into a beam visible twenty-five miles at sea.
The lighthouse was lit in July of eighteen sixty. Confederate sympathizers extinguished it in eighteen sixty-one. They did not simply douse the flame. They removed the illuminating apparatus, the Fresnel lens and its brass fittings, and buried the equipment in the sand along Jupiter Creek to keep Union ships from recovering it.
The light remained dark through the entire Civil War. When the war ended and the newly appointed lighthouse keeper returned to Jupiter, he had to find where the lens had been buried, dig it up, clean it, and reinstall it. The light was relit in eighteen sixty-six.
There is archaeological evidence of continuous Native American habitation at the Jupiter Inlet from three thousand years before Christ until the arrival of English settlers. The Seminoles traveled this coast by dugout canoe, using the Loxahatchee River and the Indian River as their interior highway. The river's name, Loxahatchee, means something close to turtle river in the Mikasuki language. Turtles still nest on these beaches.
The Loxahatchee River Historical Society has managed the lighthouse and its surrounding structures since nineteen ninety-four. The tower is open to climb, and from the top you can see the same coastline Meade surveyed, unchanged in its basic geography for about five thousand years.
