For more than a century and a half, the first thing a mariner saw approaching Tampa Bay from the Gulf was the light on Egmont Key. The tower that stands there now is the second on the site, the first having lasted only months before a hurricane swept it away, and its history is a compressed version of everything that has happened at the mouth of this bay: storm, war, and slow erosion, all written in one white tower.
As Gulf shipping grew in the 1840s and vessels kept grounding on the bars at the bay's entrance, the government built a lighthouse on Egmont Key, lit in 1848. It was the only light on the long coast between St. Marks and Key West, and it barely survived its first season. The Great Gale of 1848 swept over the low island that September with a surge that put the whole key under water. The keeper, by the account that has come down, grew so alarmed as the storm rose that he loaded his family into a small boat, lashed it to a stout tree, and rode out the hurricane afloat while the tide climbed nearly ten feet over the island. The lighthouse was wrecked. The keeper rowed to Tampa, resigned, and wanted nothing more to do with the work.
The government rebuilt in 1858, this time to a specification that it should “withstand any storm.” The engineer was William F. Raynolds, a West Point graduate who would later lead the Raynolds Expedition that explored the upper Yellowstone country. His tower was a stout brick column about eighty-seven feet tall with walls three feet thick at the base, set further back from the water and fitted with a Fresnel lens that threw its beam some fifteen miles out to sea. In 1858 it was the only lighthouse on the entire Gulf coast of Florida between Pensacola and Key West. That tower still stands and still works, one of the oldest structures of any kind at the mouth of Tampa Bay; it has outlasted the fort later built beside it, the town that grew up around it, and most of the island it marks. It even rode out Hurricane Helene in 2024, which destroyed nearly every other structure left on the key.
The lighthouse's strangest chapter came with the Civil War. In 1861, rather than let the valuable light serve Union blockaders, Confederate sympathizers removed its expensive Fresnel lens and machinery and spirited the apparatus away to the mainland, leaving the tower dark. The Union Navy then seized the undefended island and made it a base for its blockade of Tampa Bay, using the empty lighthouse as a watchtower over the Gulf and the island as a haven for Unionist refugees and escaped slaves. The light was not restored to service until after the war. Eighty years later the tower served as a watchtower once more, this time scanning the Gulf for German U-boats during the Second World War. It is a small, vivid record of how even a lighthouse, the most neutral and humanitarian of structures, was pulled again and again into the bay's wars.
The Egmont light has been automated since 1990, one of the last in the country to lose its resident keeper, but it burns still, an active aid to navigation guiding ships into the same channel that George Gauld and Francisco Maria Celi charted in the eighteenth century. It is the working twin of the smaller Mullet Key Shoal Light across the water, and together they are the reason the deep, treacherous entrance to Tampa Bay could be run at night at all. The tower has watched everything pass: the blockade runners, the troopships, the buoy tender Blackthorn on its last voyage, the freighters that still file in by the hundreds. It is the oldest sentinel of the bay's mouth, and it is not finished yet.