Florida Lighthouses

St. Augustine holds the oldest lighthouse site in Florida: an old Spanish watchtower became the state's first lighthouse in 1824, on a light station the Coast Guard dates to 1821.

The Coast Guard Historian's Office fact sheet for St. Augustine Light on Anastasia Island records that the first lamps came from the contractor Winslow Lewis and that a fourth order Fresnel lens replaced them in 1855 (USCG, St. Augustine Lighthouse). During the Civil War, Confederate supporters removed that lens and hid it, and the first lighthouse was relit after the war in 1867. Work on a replacement started in 1871. The old tower burned for the last time on October 14, 1874, the new one was lit on October 15, 1874, and the old lighthouse crashed into the sea in 1878.

The present tower is listed at 165 feet, against 52 feet for the first one, painted in black and white spiral bands with a red lantern and fitted in 1874 with a first order Fresnel lens. It was electrified in 1936 and automated in 1955, when the last keeper retired. St. Johns County bought the keeper's house property for $29,000 in 1970 after it was damaged by arson, and the station joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1981 (USCG fact sheet).

Seminoles attacked the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne on July 23, 1836, during the Seminole War, and set it on fire while the assistant keeper held out at the top of the tower.

The Coast Guard fact sheet says the first Cape Florida tower was completed in 1825, 65 feet high, of solid brick and 5 feet thick at the base, guiding ships past the Florida Reef into Cape Florida Channel (USCG, Cape Florida Lighthouse). Thompson, the assistant keeper on the day of the attack, survived and was taken to a military hospital. Rebuilding was authorized in 1837 but, the narrative says, not completed until 1846 because hostile Indians remained nearby in the Everglades.

The same page is internally inconsistent: its data block gives 1845 as the year the current tower was first lit, while the narrative gives 1846 for the end of rebuilding. Both figures come from the Coast Guard, and this page does not choose between them. The fact sheet adds that the tower was raised to 95 feet in 1855, its lighting apparatus was destroyed in 1861 and restored in 1867, the light was discontinued in 1878 when Fowey Rock Light was established, and the data block lists it as automated in 1976 and deactivated from 1990 to 1996 (USCG fact sheet). The state of Florida acquired the property in the 1960s and developed it into Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, and the lighthouse was restored with the cooperation of the Coast Guard (USCG, Cape Florida).

The first tower at Mosquito Inlet, the site of today's Ponce de Leon Inlet Light in Ponce Inlet, Florida, was finished in 1835 but never lit because its oil never arrived, and after a hurricane and a Seminole attack that year the area was abandoned.

Congress appropriated $11,000 for the Florida lighthouse on June 30, 1834, and Winslow Lewis completed a 45-foot tower in February 1835 at a cost of $7,494, according to the Coast Guard fact sheet (USCG, Ponce de Leon Inlet Light). An October 1835 hurricane washed away the keeper's quarters and left the tower leaning, and on December 26, 1835 Seminole Indians smashed all the glass in the lantern and set fire to its wooden stairs. The area was abandoned, and in April 1836 the unrepaired tower was left to fall into the sea.

The present tower was designed by Francis Hopkinson Smith on ten acres bought on March 21, 1883. The fact sheet's data block gives 1887 as the year it was first lit, while its timeline prints November 1, 1881 for the same event; both appear on the federal page. The Coast Guard abandoned the station in 1970, the light was deeded to the town of Ponce Inlet in 1972, it returned to active service in 1982, and the lighthouse and keeper's quarters opened to the public for tours in 2002 (USCG fact sheet). The fact sheet's tower height entry reads 45 feet, the same figure it gives for the 1835 tower, so it is not used here for the present tower.

The Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse in northern Palm Beach County was designed by Lieutenant George Meade, later the Union general at Gettysburg, and completed in 1860 as a 108-foot brick tower.

The Bureau of Land Management says President Franklin Pierce ordered the Fort Jupiter Lighthouse Reservation in 1854 and that the tower was topped with a first-order Fresnel lens made in Paris by Henry-LePaute (BLM, Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse ONA). The light was disabled during much of the Civil War by its assistant keeper, a Southern sympathizer. The tower now stands inside the 120-acre Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse Outstanding Natural Area, which Congress designated in 2008 and which BLM describes as the only unit of the National Conservation Lands east of the Mississippi River. BLM adds that the lighthouse itself and its associated buildings are under U.S. Coast Guard jurisdiction and open for guided tours only (BLM).

The tower is run as the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse and Museum at 500 Captain Armour's Way, Jupiter. The museum lists itself as closed Mondays and open Tuesday through Sunday from 10am to 5pm, with last entry at 4pm, phone 561.747.8380 (Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse and Museum). The BLM page gives a seasonal schedule instead: open seven days a week from January through April and Tuesday through Sunday from May through December, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The two pages differ on Mondays from January through April (BLM). For the trails rather than the tower, BLM points to a small parking area on the north side of South Beach Road (BLM).

The Florida Reef lights are skeleton iron towers on the offshore reefs, planned from 1851, and the Dry Tortugas lighthouses on Garden Key and Loggerhead Key now sit inside a national park.

The Coast Guard says plans for a series of great offshore lighthouses to mark the Florida Reefs date to 1851, and that the towers, all of skeleton iron construction to resist hurricanes, went up one at a time over the following years (USCG, American Shoal Light). American Shoal, the most recently built, was first lighted on the night of July 15, 1880, after about two years of construction at a cost of about $94,000. Its light stands 109 feet above the water, visible for 16 miles on a clear night, and it was automated in 1963, when its original lens was removed; the light now uses a solar powered fourth order lens. The fact sheet compares it with the near twin Fowey Rocks Lighthouse near Miami.

Farther west, the National Park Service says the Garden Key light was one of three lighthouses Congress slated for the Florida Straits in 1824, and a 65-foot tower was finished there by 1826 (NPS, Dry Tortugas lighthouses). Shipwrecks and navigation problems increased until 1858, when the brighter Dry Tortugas Light, now called the Loggerhead light, was built on Loggerhead Key. After hurricanes in 1873 and 1875, a new harbor light was finished on a bastion of Fort Jefferson by the end of 1876. Loggerhead Light was fully automated in 1982, when the last Coast Guard crew left the island.

Several historic Florida lights now belong to a museum, a town or the state, and the table below names the steward wherever an official page does.

One federal route for such transfers is the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000, which lets federally owned historic light stations go to federal and state agencies and private entities and is administered jointly by the National Park Service, the Coast Guard, the General Services Administration and State Historic Preservation Officers (NPS, National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act). For St. Augustine, the Coast Guard's 2002 entry lists the light as an official, privately owned, active aid to navigation that its museum owns and maintains (USCG).

For a climb, the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum says it is open daily from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM from October 1 to February 28 (last ticket 5:30 PM) and until 6:30 PM from March 1 to September 30, closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day and early, at 3:00 PM, on Christmas Eve; it uses 100 Red Cox Drive as its GPS address and (904) 829-0745 as its phone (St. Augustine Lighthouse, visit page). Its visit page also posts earlier last climb times on set dates, such as 4:15 PM on November 24 and 4:30 PM on December 13.

Last verified: October 19, 2026, by re-reading the Coast Guard Historian's Office fact sheets for St. Augustine, Cape Florida, Ponce de Leon Inlet and American Shoal, the BLM Jupiter Inlet page, the Park Service's Dry Tortugas lighthouse and lighthouse preservation act pages, and the two museums' own hours.