Sanibel Island Lighthouse
by Susan Molnar
Title
Sanibel Island Lighthouse
Artist
Susan Molnar
Medium
Photograph - Photograph - Fine Art Photography, Digital Photo-art, Digital Photo-painting. All Work Is Digitally Signed And Year-dated By The Photographer/artist.
Description
This photograph of the Sanibel Island Lighthouse was taken in 2016. The photo was then digitally watercolored and signed by the photographer/artist.
History from LighthouseFriends.com: Work on the lighthouse began on the eastern tip of the island in February 1884, while the superstructure was fabricated in the north and shipped to the site. A 162-foot-long, T-head wharf was built on creosoted piles, allowing materials to be landed for the tower and for two keeper’s dwellings, topped by hipped roofs and supported by iron pilings. Just two miles from Sanibel Island, the ship carrying the iron work from Jersey City for the towers at both Sanibel Island and Cape San Blas sank. Crews aboard the lighthouse tenders Arbutus and Mignonette, assisted by a diver, were able to fish up all of the pieces save two small gallery brackets, which were subsequently fabricated in New Orleans. Consisting of four iron legs arranged in a pyramidal fashion around a cylindrical central column topped by a lantern room, the lighthouse was ready to be lit by keeper Dudley Richardson on August 20, 1884. A third-order Fresnel lens graced the tower at a height of about ninety-eight feet and produced a fixed white light, punctuated every two minutes by a brilliant flash. Just like its twin at Cape San Blas, the central column of Sanibel Island Lighthouse stops about twenty feet from the ground and must be accessed by an external staircase.
The property was transferred from the Coast Guard to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2000. The BLM accepted an application from the City of Sanibel for custody of the property in 2004, and after a lengthy delay, the lighthouse was officially transferred to the city during a ceremony held April 21, 2010. Using a $50,000 state historic preservation grant and money from its beach parking fund, Sanibel City Council awarded a $269,563 contract to Razorback LLC in May 2013 to restore the lighthouse. During the summer of 2013, the contractors replaced sections of deteriorated steel on the tower and then sanded and painted the exterior. The City of Sanibel has certainly shown it is committed to preserving the lighthouse property. In 2016, the lighthouse, dwellings were added to the City of Sanibel’s Regsiter of Historic Sites and Structures.
Uploaded
November 28th, 2016
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Viewed 651 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 04/21/2024 at 3:57 AM
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