Joseph’s wife, Maria Mestre de los Dolores Andreu, took over as keeper and served until the light was extinguished shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1859, Joseph Andreu, a cousin of Juan Andreu and the fourth head keeper of the light, fell sixty feet to his death when the lashing of the scaffolding gave way while he was whitewashing the tower. The lighthouse was outfitted with a fourth-order, revolving Fresnel lens in 1854, and by this time the height of the tower had been increased to over fifty feet. Juan Andreu, a Minorcan, was paid $350 a year to care for the lighthouse and tend the ten oil lamps, set in silver, bowl-shaped reflectors. With a height of roughly thirty feet, the modified tower was placed in service in 1824. Augustine, proposed that the old Spanish tower be converted into a lighthouse, and Congress appropriated $5,000 on Mafor performing the work. John Rodman, the customs collector at St. Government worked quickly to establish a light to mark the inlet. Augustine was the leading port in the newly acquired Territory of Florida, the U.S. However, under the 1783 Treaty of Paris, control of Florida was returned to the Spanish, who controlled Florida until they relinquished it to the United States in 1821.Īs St. ![]() Spain ceded control of Florida to the English in 1763 to regain control of Cuba. Later, a more permanent tower was built using blocks of coquina that was formed as large deposits of shells were cemented together over time by calcium carbonate. Early on, the Spanish constructed a wooden lookout tower. On the northern end of Anastasia Island, several towers have been built through the years overlooking the inlet that leads to St. Augustine, the Matanzas River empties into the Atlantic, flowing past barrier islands named Anastasia and Conch. Augustine, and soon the fledgling colony of St. Menendez arrived off the Florida coast on August 28, 1565, the Feast Day of St. Don Juan Ponce de Leon discovered La Florida, the “Land of Flowers,” in 1513 for Spain, and roughly fifty years later, Spain made a serious attempt at colonizing Florida by dispatching Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles to the area. ![]() Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement on the North American continent, is affectionately called the Old City. Three years later, she died at age 85, but the Mabritys had spawned a lighthouse dynasty.St. When she refused to step down, she was fired after 38 years of service, 32 of them as head lighthouse keeper. Mabrity, now 82-years-old and not a weak woman, was staunchly defiant. Nevertheless, in 1864, it was alleged that Mabrity made remarks disloyal to the Union and was urged to retire. In fact, the Key West Lighthouse was the only Florida light station not to fall to the Confederacy during the war. She never failed to keep the light shining, though many of the lights further north along the southeastern seaboard were extinguished to thwart navigation of Union ships maintaining the blockade. Barbara Mabrity, too, had pro-South leanings but took her lighthouse duties seriously. ![]() The Fort was central to the Union’s sea blockade during the war.Įven though Key West was a Union city, its residents were sympathetic to the Confederacy. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Fort Zachary Taylor remained under Union control. Tenneessee Williams Key West Festival 2024.In Focus – Images from Permanent Collection.Assignment Key West 1938: Arthur Rothstein Photographs.Depicting Hemingway: Guy Harvey Sketches.Key West’s Black History: Shaping an Island.Beaches, Creatures & Cowboys: Florida’s Movie Posters.Depicting Hemingway – Guy Harvey Sketches ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.Tennessee Williams – The Playwright and the Painter.Overseas to the Keys – Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railway.Key West Shutter Stories by Elizabeth Devries.
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