At Ponce Inlet, we’re inevitably compared to our northernmost sister, the St. Augustine Lighthouse. First, we’re both brick giants, and built in the twenty-year period after the Civil War when the southern coast of the United States needed to be lit. Just like the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, the St. Augustine Light Station is a now privately maintained non-profit aid to navigation and an active, working lighthouse in the historic town of St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest and first port, about seventy-one miles north of the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse.
While the plan of the United States Lighthouse Board was to raise coastal light towers so ship’s captains could see one new light over the bow while still seeing one just passed over the stern, it didn’t always perfectly work out that way. Raising the Mosquito/Ponce light a little further south at that notorious inlet made more sense. There it would do double duty of coastal and inlet marking.
The current St. Augustine light, a brick conical tower at 165 feet, stands at the north end of Anastasia Island and was first lit in 1874, thirteen years before Mosquito was lit. This tower was the second to be raised in St. Augustine. The first, a square tower at 52 feet was built in 1824 by the American government as Florida’s first official lighthouse. Some records and maps say the first tower was placed on the site of an earlier Spanish watch tower built in the late 16th century.
The St. Augustine Light Station’s magnificent tower is the work of US Lighthouse Board Chief Draftsman Paul Peltz, whose other lighthouse work those years included brick giants Bodie Island, Sand Island, Currituck, Morris Island, and design work on Mosquito-Ponce Inlet, for which he never really got credit. Peltz’s major Washington, D.C. achievement was as the chief architect for the Library of Congress.
Research shows that beacons as aids to navigation on wooden watch towers were built and maintained at St. Augustine by Spanish and British governments since 1565. St. Augustine’s 1824 tower was lit by Winslow Lewis’ lard oil lamps with reflectors. A First Order Flashing Fresnel Lens lit the new 1874 tower, lit thirteen years before Mosquito Ponce. In 1885 the St. Augustine lamp was converted to kerosene. Since 1936, St. Augustine Lighthouse has flashed every thirty-seconds. It is now electrified as were all American light stations by the 1920’s.
