Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse: Tallest in Florida
Near Daytona, Florida
Standing one hundred seventy-five feet above the inlet at the southern end of Daytona Beach, the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in Florida and the second tallest in the United States, behind Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. It is also, by any measure, one of the most eventful lighthouses in American history, literary and otherwise.
The first attempt to mark this inlet came in eighteen thirty-five, when the United States government erected a tower on the south side of what was then called Mosquito Inlet. It was a disaster almost immediately. The oil for the lamp was never delivered. A storm washed sand from around the base. Then the Second Seminole War began, and Seminole warriors attacked the lighthouse in December of eighteen thirty-five, smashing the lantern glass and burning the wooden stairs. The abandoned tower stood dark for fifty years.
The current brick tower was completed in eighteen eighty-seven and went into service guiding ships through one of Florida's most dangerous stretches of coast. It uses a first-order Fresnel lens, which concentrates a single lamp flame into a beam visible for miles offshore. The lens is still on display in the museum on site.
In January of eighteen ninety-seven, a gun-runner named the SS Commodore sank in a storm off this coast. Among the survivors clinging to a small dinghy for thirty hours was a twenty-five-year-old journalist named Stephen Crane, who was on his way to Cuba to cover what would become the Spanish-American War. Crane and three others sighted the lighthouse and rowed for it, then capsized in the surf. One man, a sailor named Billie Higgins, drowned. Crane survived and published his account the following year as a short story called The Open Boat. It is considered one of the finest short stories in the American language.
The lighthouse was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-eight, one of only eleven lighthouses in the country to earn that designation. You can climb all two hundred three steps to the top.
