Florida Lighthouses
Images of America Series

by John Hairr

Copyright 1999, 2000, Arcadia Publishing
128 pages, Softcover, 9.25"x6.5"

From the back cover:
Sporting the second longest coastline in the United States, Florida has over 8,000 miles of sparkling beaches and waterfront property. This valuable landscape and the region's position between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico made Florida key in the early expansion of American trade routes, but the state's several capes and dangerous reefs, rocks, and shoals made travel quite perilous to unwary mariners. When commerce and traffic begin to grow between ports on the East Coast along the Gulf of Mexico in the nineteenth century, it became necessary to construct aids to navigation along the state's long and treacherous coast. Lighthouses were the solution.

Constructed in a variety of styles and sizes, Florida's lighthouses were erected on what, at the time, where some of the most desolate regions of the southeastern United States and included lonely offshore islands. Manned and inhabited by vigilant keepers and their families, these towers illuminated the dark seas and provided the beacon that guided lost travelers. Large brick structures watched over St. Augustine, Pensacola, and Ponce De Leon inlet; iron skeletons towered over Crooked River and Hillsboro Inlet; and screwpile lighthouses stood as sentinels in the waters off the Florida Keys.

Florida Lighthouses is a fascinating visual tour of the lighthouses that dot the Florida coast from Amelia Island to Pensacola and the people who maintained that saving light. In this day of increased technology and satellite navigation, many lighthouses have become obsolete, but their history is being preserved. In this pictorial retrospective, author John Hairr has compiled an array of vintage photographs that tell the tale of a maritime era of long ago and the lighthouses that once called sailors safely home.