Beacons for a Troubled Age

In the second half of the twentieth century, automation and other modern technologies displaced traditional aids to navigation across the shorelines of the United States, leaving historic light stations imperiled as obsolete. Hundreds of those light stations faced ruin until local initiatives, working in partnership with the US Coast Guard and state and federal agencies, found innovative ways to preserve the light towers and their supporting structures as heritage sites and museums. The American lighthouse preservation movement ranks among historic preservationists' greatest success stories. The restoration of the St. Augustine Lighthouse on the northeastern coast of Florida, spearheaded by an area women's organization in the 1980s, provides a noteworthy example of such a reorientation. Built in 1874 as one of the tallest lighthouse towers in the nation, St. Augustine's beacon today welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to climb its tower and view exhibits in its maritime museum. Drawing upon spiritual associations with lighthouses and the marketability of the towers' iconic imagery, the lighthouse reclamation effort offers wider civic lessons in government partnership and problem-solving. Even so, the limits of those successes are also apparent, given the challenges facing less-romanticized historic sites as well as the urgent threats of climate change and sea level rise pressing upon these same communities

Beacon · General partnership · Recreation · Shore · American Environmental and Regional History · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability