St. Augustine Light

The St. Augustine Light Station is a privately maintained aid to navigation and an active, working lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida. The current lighthouse stands at the north end of Anastasia Island and was built between 1871 and 1874. The tower is the second lighthouse tower in St. Augustine, the first being lit officially by the American territorial government in May 1824 as Florida's first lighthouse. However, both the Spanish and the British governments operated a major aid to navigation here including a series of wooden watch towers and beacons dating from 1565.

The current lighthouse tower, original first-order Fresnel Lens and the Light Station grounds are owned by the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum, Inc., a not-for-profit maritime museum. The museum is open to the public 360 days a year. Admission fees support continued preservation of the lighthouse and five other historic structures. Admissions and museum memberships also fund programs in maritime archaeology, traditional wooden boatbuilding, and maritime education. The non profit mission is to "discover, preserve, present and keep alive the stories of the nation's oldest port as symbolized by our working St. Augustine Lighthouse."

St. Augustine was the site of the first lighthouse established in Florida by the new, territorial, American Government in 1824. According to some archival records and maps, this "official" American lighthouse was placed on the site of an earlier watchtower built by the Spanish as early as the late 16th century. A map of St. Augustine made by Baptista Boazio in 1589, depicting Sir Francis Drake's attack on the city, shows an early wooden watch tower near the Spanish structure, which was described as a "beacon" in Drake's account. By 1737, Spanish authorities built a more permanent tower from coquina taken from a nearby quarry on the island. Archival records are inconclusive as to whether the Spanish used the coquina tower as a lighthouse, but it seems plausible, given the levels of maritime trade by that time. The structure was regularly referred to as a "lighthouse" in documents—including ship's logs and nautical charts—dating to the British Period beginning in 1763.

In 1783, the Spanish once again took control of St. Augustine, and once again the lighthouse was improved. Swiss-Canadian engineer and marine surveyor Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres marks a coquina "Light House" on Anastasia Island in his 1780 engraving, "A Plan of the Harbour of St. Augustin". Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Royal French Hydrographer, refers to the coquina tower as a "Batise" in Volume I of Petit Atlas Maritime. The accuracy of these scholars is debated still; DesBarres's work includes some obvious errors, but Bellin is considered highly qualified. His work provides an important reference to St. Augustine's geography and landmarks in 1764. Facing erosion and a changing coastline, the old tower crashed into the sea in 1880, but not before a new lighthouse was lit. Today, the tower ruins are a submerged archaeological site.^{[citation needed]}

Early lamps in the first tower burned lard oil. Multiple lamps with silver reflectors were replaced by a fourth order Fresnel lens in 1855, greatly improving the lighthouse's range and eliminating some maintenance issues.

At the beginning of the Civil War, future mayor Paul Arnau, a local Menorcan harbor master, along with the lightkeeper, a woman named Maria Mestre de los Dolores Andreu (who, in this role, became the first Hispanic-American woman to serve in the Coast Guard), removed the lens from the old lighthouse and hid it, in order to block Union shipping lanes as well as to help blockade runners remain hidden.

The lens and clock works were recovered after Arnau was held captive on a ship off-shore and forced to reveal their location.

By 1870, beach erosion was threatening the first lighthouse. Construction on a new light tower began in 1871 during Florida's reconstruction period. In the meantime, a jetty of coquina and brush was built to protect the old tower. A trolley track brought building supplies from the ships at the dock. The new tower was completed in 1874, and put into service with a new first order Fresnel lens. It was lit for the first time in October by keeper William Russell. Russell was the first lighthouse keeper in the new tower, and the only keeper to have worked both towers.