This Labor Day, walk in the shoes of pioneers, hotellers, lighthouse keepers, and their families doing housekeeping, chores, children’s tasks and games!
The National Historic Landmark Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and Museum and the Pacetti Hotel Museum are open and welcome all to celebrate Labor Day, Monday, September 2, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. with programs, uniformed keeper and family – docents on the lighthouse station and in the hotel and on the grounds to answer questions and conduct mini-tours, workshops and a take-home children’s craft.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries without the benefit of present-day time-saving household appliances like washing machines and dryers, all lighthouse families designated days of the week for certain chores. After Sunday, supposedly a Day of Rest, Monday was wash day, usually the most onerous chore, especially with large families as the norm. On the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse Labor Day, Docents Janice Lowery and Don McGuire will portray a late 19th century keeper and wife demonstrating the hand tools and necessary labor used to keep a family with many children through a typical late 19th century Monday of washing the family clothes and performing many other tasks that were needed to keep a good house. Lowery and McGuire portray the legendary keeper O’Hagans, who served at Mosquito and many lighthouses across the South with their eventual tribe of twelve children in the early 1900’s. This is a lesson itself in change and technology from present day housekeeping chores, equipment and tasks. While the hotel staff, for a long time also the family, labored similarly, the Pacetti family had more of a variety of duties because of the number of and needs of their guests.
While the distaff is busy demonstrating their household chores, uniformed keeper docents will describe and demonstrate some of a lighthouse keeper’s duties before electricity and other modernizations came to the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse station. Back-in-the-day, three keepers were necessarily stationed at the then Mosquito Inlet Lighthouse – now Ponce Inlet – from its first lighting in 1887, because of the huge and many human responsibilities involved in maintaining this major First Order Light Station along one of the most important shipping routes in the world.
The Pacetti Hotel
The concept of hotel and boarding house is thousands of years old. The Romans laid roadways across their empire and their traders-people were in need a place to stop during the darkness of night to refresh themselves and their horses which drew their carts.
Boarding Houses became more popular and even essential in the United States after the American Civil War, the opening of the frontier, and the Industrial Revolution. Commerce, trade and even leisure travel all demanded more beds for the travelers and stables for the horses and coaches. Later, passengers travelling by train, were housed in special hotels built trackside by the railroad company.. More people moved from the farm to the city for employment. In Boston, in the early years of the 19th century, when landlords and their boarders were added up, between one-third and one-half of the entire city population lived in a boarding house.
The Pacetti Hotel was opened and operated by the Pacetti Family who sold ten acres of their family’s Spanish Land Grant property to the United States Lighthouse Establishment so that the Mosquito Inlet Lighthouse, now the present Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, could be built to mark about 100 miles of “dark coast” between the St. Augustine Lighthouse to the North and the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse to the South. The Pacetti’s used the $400 to enlarge the family home to create a twelve-room hotel. The hotel’s clientele went from the laborers who built the lighthouse to wealthy American giants of industry, and in fact the hotel last served as a vacation get-a-way for members of the Proctor and Gamble family.
Be sure to experience the climb of 203 steps and take in the amazing bird’s-eye-view from the 175-step lighthouse gallery at the top of Florida’s tallest building for 26 years. In 1913 the Heard National Bank at 180 feet was built in Jacksonville.
General admission tickets may be purchased during the day in the Lighthouse Giftshop at the time of your arrival. Parking is available at both the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and the Historic Pacetti Hotel.
General Lighthouse Museum Tickets are $6.95 for adults (12+), and children (3-11 at) $1.95. Infants (0-2) are free.
General Pacetti Hotel Museum Tickets are $5.00 for adults (12+), and children (3-11) $1.00. Infants (0-2) are free.
General Combo-Museum Tickets (Lighthouse and Hotel) Adults (age 12+) $ $11.95, and children (Age 3-11) $2.95. Infants (0-2) are free.
Free admission is provided to both the Lighthouse Museum and the Pacetti Hotel Museum with proof of Museum Preservation Association, FLA membership or proof of Ponce Inlet residency.
For more information please contact the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse at 386-761-1821, Extension 18.
