DESTINATION: Crooked River Lighthouse: Forgotten treasure on Florida’s Forgotten Coast

Round and round, the spherical staircase winds past tiny ventilation windows; 128 inside steps narrow to mere inches wide near the top of the circular parapet. The spiraling whitewashed bannisters fling the intrepid guest – adventurous enough to scale the 103-feet tower - onto the gallery platform at the top of the lantern house.

Heavy iron doors, leading to the wrap-around deck, creak open to a magnificent view: a panorama of Carrabelle’s bay, Dog Island, and the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico.

For 120 years, the Crooked River Lighthouse - the tallest beacon on the Forgotten Coast - has guided timber ships and mariners through the treacherous East Pass between Dog Island and St. George.

With a stationary eight-inch metal halide 1,000-watt bulb sitting at the focal point of a replica fourth-order Fresnel lens, the torch emits a 100,000-lumen white light visible five miles away.

Historic lighthouse memorabilia, including an old Fresnel lens, is inside the Keeper’s Museum at the Crooked River Lighthouse.

Each flicker a typical lighthouse rotating beacon, flashing much brighter than the surrounding lights on shore, providing safe passage to local fishers and commercial oyster-men through the dangerous strait.

The Crooked River Lighthouse was built on the mainland in 1895, off Carrabelle Beach, to serve as the rear range navigational light for the channel west of Dog Island, used by logging ships.

Restored in 2007, the iron skeleton structure today sits on publicly-owned park grounds, managed by the Carrabelle Lighthouse Association, and acts as the trailhead of the Carrabelle Beach biking path.

The light-station property originally included keeper houses; nowadays, a facsimile of the Keeper’s home functions as a museum/gift shop.

Admission to the Crooked River Lighthouse Park is free, but it costs $5 to climb the tower.

Ava Gombas has manned the souvenir emporium for several years.

“I started working here right after Hurricane Michael. There was a lot of clean-up to do. Luckily, most of the trees and debris were used in the fire pit purchased for our ‘Full-moon Climb [events] with some mores,” Gombas said.

This lighthouse presently stationed in Carrabelle has had quite the history.

Built on Dog Island in 1839 as a 50-foot brick tower, three years later, it was razed by a hurricane. Reconstructed by 1843 – this time, a 40-foot wooden pharos– the second tower, likewise, was obliterated by another storm in 1851.

The third time was not the charm, the last light tower of 1852 (brick) toppled by yet another storm.

Marine captains demanded a better site and in 1883, Congress approved a new lighthouse – on the mainland – with a price tag of $40,000.

The City of Carrabelle was founded in 1893 and two years after, construction commenced in January 1895.

This fourth time, engineers opted for a conical-style beacon with an iron-and-steel skeleton; construction included two keepers’ quarters, a pier, outlying buildings, and an oil-house.

With conversion to electricity still two decades into the future, the oil-shed stored the highly unstable, explosive fuels – sperm whale blubber, petroleum, or kerosene - burned in the lanterns.

The lighthouse was painted solid red with a black parapet. The current-day color scheme didn’t come into effect until the turn-of-the-century (1901), when the lower half was redone in white, to stand out against the surrounding pine forest.

The view from the Lighthouse Walkway, of Carrabelle Bay.

By summer of 1895, the beacon was complete, minus the lens, which would be made by the Henry LePaute Company in Paris, probably the first of its kind installed in the United States.

October 28, 1895, at 5:12p.m., Keeper James Williams lit the newly-rebuilt Crooked River Lighthouse for the first time.

In 1933, the oil-burning apparatus was changed out for an incandescent, 13,000-lumens, 1000-watt bulb.

Then-Keeper Thorwald Hansen sighed with relief, no longer required to clean the oily soot every day that accumulated on that exceedingly-valuable lens.

Nevertheless, every four hours, chains had to be wound to keep the light rotating for a supplementary four hours, using a ‘clockworks-driven’ machinery scheme of gears.

At night, the keeper had to stand guard in the watch room, where he jotted weather conditions and unusual happenings into his logbook.

By 1952, a motor to spin the beacon at increased speed without abrasion – a mercury basin - replaced the inefficient ‘clockwork’ mechanism. Another device turned the light on at dusk and off at sunrise.

These fully-automating, newfangled gadgets eventually replaced the human lighthouse keepers; the last one left the property within two years.

All was well at the Crooked River Lighthouse…until ’76 when Coast Guard inspectors detected mercury leakage from the ‘float’ container.

Understanding the hazards of mercury, the surveyors removed the lens and sent it to their New Orleans’ headquarters.

In its stead, they inserted a modern-optic lens lit by a 250-watt halogen bulb, of 4,200-lumen output.

At the focal point of the rotational lens was a $2,500 bulb-changer that advanced to a fresh lamp whenever one burned out every 5 months.

The bulb changer, itself, would become debilitated every 4-5 years, whenever the beacon stopped in line with a bright sunset, whereby the lens worked backwards, and ‘fried’ the expensive hanger at the refraction point.

The Crooked River Lighthouse in Carrabelle, over 120 years old, stands as a forgotten treasure of Florida’s Forgotten Coast.

This costly system remained until the 1995 lighthouse decommissioning, when, months short of its 100th anniversary, the Crooked River Lighthouse was closed.

In 1999 - five dedicated locals formed the Carrabelle Lighthouse Association, succeeding in getting the lighthouse deeded to the City of Carrabelle, when the United States Coast Guard announced intentions to ‘surplus’ the tower, auctioning it to the highest bidder.

The landmark’s relighting in 2001 was symbolic, as the flashes failed to ‘stand out’ against the newer, brighter streetlights onshore.

So, when the chain drive failed in 2018, the Carrabelle Lighthouse Association spent $250 for a new chain, motor and bearings, and replaced the bulb changer with the ‘gymnasium lightbulb’ currently glowing today…a $10 torch that takes one minute to warm up, produces white light of 100,000 lumens, and has a five-year life-expectancy.

“We got the original lens back from the Coast Guard on February 19, 2019,” says Gombas. “We plan on putting the lens behind a plexiglass display.”

Inside the Keeper’s Museum, along with pages from the Keeper’s journal…a barometer and glass fire grenade…an oversized search lantern made of brass…all late 19th and early 20th-century mementos of this not-to-be-missed treasure of Florida’s Forgotten Coast.

Head down to the seaside of Carrabelle, straddling the Gulf of Mexico, and check out this light-station that’s been a beacon for pleasure-craft sailors and mercantile mariners for 125 years.

Climb the spiraling staircase to the lantern room; step onto the outside gallery that circles the tower, and pretend you’re a lighthouse keeper of yore, scanning the horizon for distant ships.

Crooked River Lighthouse, 1975 Hwy 98 West, Carrabelle, Florida Telephone: (850) 697-2732 Hours: Wednesday-Friday: - 11:00-5:00, Saturday – 9:00-5:00, and Sunday – 1:00-5:00. Free admission to Keeper’s House Museum, gift shop and park, but $5 fee/adult and $3/child to climb the tower.

Vickie Lillo - Gadsden County News Service

DESTINATION: Crooked River Lighthouse: Forgotten treasure on Florida’s Forgotten Coast

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DESTINATION: Crooked River Lighthouse: Forgotten treasure on Florida’s Forgotten Coast

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Insight From the Garden: What to plant in your fall garden

Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department’s open house shows firefighting, rescue tactics up close

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