Daytona's Ponce Inlet Lighthouse makes a great one-tank trip
By SUSAN GREEN | The Tampa Tribune
Published: July 27, 2009
PONCE INLET - Since 1887, a rust-red tower has kept watch over a spit of land where two rivers race to kiss the Atlantic Ocean, a spot known in Florida's wilder days by the unromantic moniker Mosquito Inlet.
Imposing by day, the landmark turns on the charm at night, its beam of light slicing through 20 miles of darkness to show mariners the way to safe harbor.
When I was a child growing up on the Daytona Beach peninsula in the 1960s, my mother occasionally drove my siblings and me several miles south to see the lighthouse. By then, the inlet had long been re-christened to commemorate Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon.
Sometimes we would pack sandwiches and head out around dusk. The light station was not open to the public, but my mother would park nearby to await for the magic moment when the light came on.
The curtain came down on our little outdoor theater in 1970, when the Coast Guard set up another beacon on the other side of Ponce Inlet. It was a simple steel structure less than a third as high as the lighthouse and completely lacking its charm. But it was cheaper to operate. The lighthouse went dark.
Nobody needed an unlit lighthouse. The tower and its surrounding buildings began to look dim and forlorn even by day, with peeling paint and windows smashed by vandals. That was the memory of my old childhood friend I carried with me when I moved away from Daytona in the late 1970s.
Recently, my family and I were vacationing in my hometown when nasty sunburns chased us away from the beach. To amuse the kids, we decided to visit some of my old haunts. I expected to find the lighthouse in shambles, if it even remained.
Instead, we drove up on a bustling complex of buildings open to the public. For a small fee, we went inside. Besides the tower, three original light-keepers' homes plus some outbuildings created a museum that took the better part of the day to tour.
And, lo and behold, the lighthouse itself was open to anyone willing to trek the 203 steps that swirled up, up, up to the top.
Those who make the spiral climb find a gallery deck encircling the tower lantern and a sprawling vista of waterways, A1A Highway businesses, homes and patches of natural Florida coast.
Armed with information from the museum tour, visitors can stand high above Daytona and picture the past: light-keepers tending the lamps with kerosene in the late 1800s; using the highest deck, or widow's walk, to scout for bootleg liquor runners during the Prohibition era; or watching the excitement of the first stock car race on the beach in 1936.
Best of all?
"The light comes on every night," proclaims Ellen Henry, museum curator for Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association, which operates the station.
And it's not just for nostalgia. High-rise condominium buildings have sprouted along the beach and waterways near Ponce Inlet, overshadowing the smaller beacon set up for navigation on the inlet's south side. So in the 1980s, the old lighthouse was pressed into service again under an agreement between the Coast Guard and the preservation association.
Seen through a child's eyes, the lighthouse was a beautiful if mysterious place in the 1960s. But Henry traces the tower's decline to the 1950s, when technological advances meant no one had to trudge up those stairs to turn on the lights.
"In 1952, it was pretty much fully automated, and they [light-keepers] didn't have to come over here every day," Henry says. "That was like the kiss of death."
Researchers and civic groups used the buildings around the tower from time to time. In 1963, Ponce Inlet incorporated as a municipality and used one of the light-keeper's homes as a town hall. But the tower itself welcomed few authorized visitors.
By the time the lights went out in 1970, vandals already had smashed windows, scrawled graffiti and strewn litter inside the tower, Henry recalls. In 1972, preservationists successfully prevailed on the town of Ponce Inlet to acquire the light station in order to save it. Refurbishing began in earnest in 1978.
Full restoration took more than three decades and millions of dollars, mostly from private donations, admission fees and gift shop revenue, Henry says. Along the way, preservationists acquired numerous seafaring artifacts to add to the station's museum collections. The tower's original lens was traced to a museum in Mystic, Conn., and returned to Ponce Inlet, where it is on display. The lens used in the tower lantern from 1933 to 1970 was restored and returned to service in 2004.
The museum offers a primer on Florida's rural coastal life in the late 1800s, when the station was lit by kerosene and its caretakers relied on boats to bring in food and supplies from New Smyrna. A road to Daytona Beach wasn't built until 1916.
Besides the tower and former light-keepers' homes, the 10-acre campus includes housing for a collection of huge Fresnel lenses, the complex devices that shoot light across miles of black sky.
At 175 feet, the Ponce Inlet tower is the tallest of 29 lighthouses and beacons listed by the Florida Lighthouse Association, and the third tallest in the United States. It's billed as one of the most complete examples of an early light station in the country.
More than that, it is once again a light station full of purpose.
"We are still an active aid to navigation," Henry says.
The Daytona area has a spotty record of historic preservation, but a couple of other nearby sites worth seeing are a short drive from Ponce Inlet.
Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens includes the remains of a 17th century sugar works and life-size concrete dinosaur statues left over from a 1940s-era theme park. The park is located at 950 Old Sugar Mill Road on the mainland in Port Orange, about eight miles from the lighthouse. Call (386) 767-1735 or visit www.dunlawtonsugarmillgardens.org for information.
The remains of Daytona's famous Boardwalk on the beach are about 10 miles north at Main Street and A1A. Most of the old arcade and amusement rides are gone, replaced by the Hilton Hotel and a large open-air mall called Ocean Walk. The city's historic band shell and clock tower, both fashioned in the 1930s from coquina rock, still stand, as does the historic Main Street Pier.
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