Key West Lighthouse

The Key West Lighthouse stands out with its slender white tower and a lantern room perched eighty-six feet above the island. It replaced an earlier tower destroyed by the Great Havana Hurricane of eighteen forty-six. By nineteen sixty-nine, the Coast Guard automated the light and decommissioned the station. Barbara Mabrity, who served as keeper for thirty-two years after her husband died in eighteen thirty-two, ran the light through storms and shipwrecks, becoming one of the few women in the service.