USLHT Azalea
tender of the United States Lighthouse Service
USLHT Azalea was built as a lighthouse tender and performed in that role on the Massachusetts coast from 1891 to 1917 and again from 1919 to 1933. During World War I, she served in the United States Navy as USS Azalea. Between the wars she was a commercial freighter in Chesapeake Bay, and later between Florida and The Bahamas. During World War II, she was reacquired by the U.S. Navy and served as USS Christiana, a seaplane tender which supported advanced bases in The Bahamas. Declared surplus in 1946, she was sold to Banana Supply Company, and spent a decade transporting bananas from the Caribbean to Miami. After 1956 her history is uncertain until she became a half-sunk derelict and was scrapped in Miami in 1965.
Construction and characteristics
In its 1888 Annual Report to the Secretary of the Treasury, the Lighthouse Board requested $80,000 for a new tender for the 2nd Lighthouse District. The urgency of this request was driven by the need to replace USLHT Putnam which was 31 years old and disabled by holes blown in her boiler. Congress approved the authorization on 2 March 1889. The contract to build Azalea was approved on 28 February 1890 and the first frame was put in place on 24 May 1890.
“USLHT Azalea” enters the record as tender of the United States Lighthouse Service. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what USLHT, Azalea and tender can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“USLHT Azalea” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, USLHT, Azalea and tender provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7866446. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1891, 1917, 1919 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “USLHT Azalea” 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.