Carysfort Reef Light
lighthouse in Florida, United States
Carysfort Reef Light is located on Carysfort Reef east of Key Largo, Florida. The lighthouse has an iron-pile foundation with a platform, and a skeletal, octagonal, pyramidal tower, which is painted red. The light was 100 feet (30 m) above the water. It was the oldest functioning lighthouse of its type in the United States until it was decommissioned in 2015, having been completed in 1852. The light last installed was a xenon flashtube beacon. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
The reef
Carysfort Reef is named for HMS Carysfort (1766), a 28-gun Royal Navy post ship that ran aground on the reef in 1770. The reef is one of the most dangerous on the Florida Reef tract which parallels the Florida Keys. Of the 324 ships that were known to have wrecked on the Florida Reef from 1833 through 1841 (during the period the lightship Florida was stationed at the reef), 63 did so on Carysfort Reef. The United States Lighthouse Board reported that "Carysfort Reef picks up twenty percent of all the wrecks between Cape Florida and the Tortugas, a space of 200 miles (320 km)."
Lightships
A survey of the Florida Keys in 1823 to locate sites for potential lighthouses and other aids to navigation produced a recommendation that a "floating light", or lightship, be placed on Carysfort Reef.
The public source identifies “Carysfort Reef Light” as lighthouse in Florida, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Carysfort, Reef and Light.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carysfort Reef Light” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.