The Cape Canaveral Lighthouse, 1848 to today

The lighthouse came to the cape a century before the rockets. On May 21, 1838, according to the Florida Department of State’s marker at the light station, Florida’s territorial delegate Charles Downing asked for a lighthouse on Cape Canaveral, where the shoals offshore were a constant danger to ships. The first one was finished in January 1848, and its replacement, an iron tower first lit in 1868, still stands, about a mile inland of where it was built. The Space Force calls it the oldest standing structure on the cape.

The brick tower, 1848

The first lighthouse was short. The marker gives it a height of 65 feet, a 55-foot brick tower under a 10-foot lantern room, with 15 lamps on 21-inch reflectors; the tower and the keeper’s house together cost under $13,300. Nathaniel Scobie oversaw the construction and appointed the first keeper. The Cape Canaveral Lighthouse Foundation, which dates the first lighting to 1849, says the lamps burned whale oil, and that the light was too low and too weak to solve the problem of the shoals.

The iron tower, 1868

Mariners complained, and in 1859 Congress voted money for a new lighthouse, the Foundation says, made of cast iron by a foundry in Cold Spring, New York. Work at the foundry had begun when the Civil War stopped it. During the war, the marker records, the Confederate Navy Secretary, S. Mallory, ordered the lighthouses of Florida’s east coast “extinguished,” and keeper Mills Burnham removed the lamp and buried it in his orange grove.

The new tower was finished after the war. It was 151 feet tall and carried a first-order Fresnel lens, which the Foundation says could be seen up to 18 miles out to sea. Its iron plates were bolted together and lined with brick, since an iron tower sways more in the wind than a masonry one.

Moving the lighthouse, 1893 and 1894

The beach would not hold still. In 1871, the marker says, a storm surge washed over the light station and spoiled the lamp oil and the drinking water, and that, with the eroding shoreline, decided the move. In February 1893 the government settled on moving the iron tower a mile and a quarter inland. From October 1893 to July 1894 it was dismantled, carried on a tram pulled by mules, and put back together on its present site, along with the keeper’s and assistant keepers’ houses. The old brick lighthouse was blown up to provide material for the new foundation. The lamp was lit at the new site in July 1894.

The Burnham keepers

Mills Olcott Burnham was head keeper from 1853 to 1886, the longest of any keeper at the cape, according to the Foundation. His two sons died young, but the husbands and sons of his five daughters became keepers and assistant keepers after him, and Burnham and his descendants kept the light for eighty years.

Coast Guard, Air Force and Space Force

The light was electrified in 1931, when a ground-level door was cut into the tower to bring in generators. The Coast Guard took ownership in 1939, and the last keeper left in 1941. The light is now automated. When the Joint Long Range Proving Ground was laid out around it after 1949, the lighthouse land was already federal property, which the Space Force’s heritage history says made acquiring the cape easier.

In 2000 stewardship of the lighthouse passed to the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base, and to the Space Force in 2020; the Coast Guard still maintains the light. The Cape Canaveral Lighthouse Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve its history and run public tours.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon