Qualla: Cape St. George Light

Cape St. George Light: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. On October 22, 2005, the brick lighthouse at Cape St. George finally lost its long battle with the Gulf of Mexico. After 153 years of standing against hurricanes, erosion, and war, the tower crumbled into the surf off St. George Island, Florida. It had been leaning for a decade, propped up and straightened by supporters who spent $210,000 trying to save it. The collapse might have been the end of the story. Instead, volunteers waded into the water, salvaged 24,000 bricks, and rebuilt the lighthouse on higher ground - proving that stubbornness runs as deep as the pine pilings the original builders drove into the sand.

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cape St. George Light: A Light for the Cotton Fleet

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The first lighthouse on St. George Island went up in 1833, marking the narrow entrance to Apalachicola Bay at West Pass, the channel between St. George Island and St. Vincent Island. In that era, Apalachicola was a booming cotton port, and the light guided merchant vessels naviga...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cape St. George Light: Built, Broken, Built Again

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The second lighthouse lasted barely four years. A hurricane undermined it in 1850, and the fourth hurricane of the 1851 Atlantic season toppled it entirely, destroying the nearby Cape San Blas and Dog Island lights in the same blow. The third version - the one that would stand fo...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cape St. George Light: The Long Surrender

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit “Jon Zander(digon3)”, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades the lighthouse served faithfully, its power source evolving from whale oil to mineral oil in 1882, then to incandescent oil vapor in 1913. Automation came in 1949, ending over a century of human keepers - men like Braddock Williams, who served two separate terms betwe...

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Image: “Jon Zander(digon3)” | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cape St. George Light: Brick by Stubborn Brick

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The collapse catalyzed something remarkable. Island volunteers formed the St. George Light Association and hired a salvage company to retrieve bricks from the water. Of the lighthouse's 160,000 original bricks, 24,000 were pulled from the Gulf, and volunteers cleaned them by hand...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0