The Saint Augustine Lighthouse
Near St. Augustine, Florida
On the north end of Anastasia Island rises the Saint Augustine Lighthouse, its black and white spiral stripes unmistakable against the sky. The tower stands one hundred and sixty-five feet tall and was first lit on the fifteenth of October, eighteen seventy-four. At its top sits a first-order Fresnel lens, hand-made in Paris, a beehive of some three hundred and seventy hand-cut glass prisms standing nine feet high.
Its beam can be seen more than twenty nautical miles out to sea, and it has watched over dangerous shoals for generations of sailors. An earlier tower stood nearby, lit in eighteen twenty-four as Florida's first lighthouse, but the sea ate away its foundation and it collapsed into the waves in eighteen eighty. Its keepers are part of the story too.
One head keeper had fought at Gettysburg, and a woman named Maria Andreu, who tended an earlier Spanish-era light, is recognized as the first Hispanic woman to serve in what became the Coast Guard. Electrified in nineteen thirty-six and automated in nineteen fifty-five, the lighthouse is now cared for by a nonprofit museum, the first United States lighthouse ever handed over to such a group.
