Weights, Measures, and Esoterica: Lighthouse of the Week, February 10-16, 2019: Port Boca Grande, Florida

Monday, February 11, 2019

Lighthouse of the Week, February 10-16, 2019: Port Boca Grande, Florida

I thought that I knew most of the lighthouses in Florida, but even though I've been to Fort Myers and Sanibel Island, I did not know about, nor had I ever seen a picture of, the Port Boca Grande lighthouse that sits at the end of Gasparilla Island, marking the entrance into Charlotte Harbor. If you look at the location, it's not one of the more accessible locations in Florida, but still, I'm surprised I had not ever heard of it until now.

So, it's this week's Lighthouse of the Week, and Lighthouse Friends has a page on it. Here's a historical picture of the lighthouse from their page:

Here's some basic info on it:

"Built in 1890, the lighthouse consists of a one-story dwelling, supported by pilings, with a square tower protruding through the center of its hipped roof. Atop the tower is mounted an octagonal lantern room that originally protected a rare third-and-a-half-order Fresnel lens, which produced a white light interrupted every twenty seconds by a red flash at a focal plane of forty-four feet. The dwelling was painted white, its shutters green, and the lantern room black. Roughly seventy feet away, a nearly identical dwelling, minus the tower, was built for the assistant keeper, and wooden storage tanks were provided to hold a supply of water for the keepers. Keeper Francis McNulty activated the lighthouse on December 31, 1890, just in time to welcome the new year."

It's also supposed to be haunted.

Given where it's located, erosion threatened to carry away the sand it was built on (via pilings), but a community association managed to get a protective jetty built, and the lighthouse was restored. (This is all in the article.) If you image-search, you'll find that it's the subject of a lot of photographs, paintings, and even models. So it's reasonably famous, too.

This leads to the pictures.