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Before construction of the first U.S. lighthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1716, only bonfires or blazing barrels of pitch on headlands guided ships to port at night. Boston had one of America’s earliest fog signals and the first buoys appeared in the Delaware River by 1767. The earliest Lightship Station was at Craney Island, Hampton Roads, Virginia, where a decked-over small boat was moored in 1820.
Responsibility for navigational aids was assumed by the Federal government in 1789. when the Lighthouse Service was part of the Treasury Department’s Revenue Marine Bureau. From 1852 to 1910, the responsibility for aids came under the rule of the Lighthouse Board, then shifted to the Commerce Department in 1903. The Service was a Commerce responsibility until it was returned to the Treasury and the Coast Guard.
The history of African Americans in the U.S. Lighthouse Service is sketchy. The first recorded mention of an African American was in 1718, when a slave who worked at the Boston Lighthouse perished with the keeper and his family during a storm. There are recorded instances of African Americans serving aboard early lightships as cooks, probably due to an 1835 regulation specifically forbidding the hiring of African Americans in other capacities. An elderly African American woman is described as tending the Simons Island Light in 1836, when the keeper was incapacitated by gout.
On a stormy March evening in 1847, an African American sailor knocked loudly on the tower door of the Isle of Shoals Lighthouse off the New Hampshire coast. He informed the assistant keeper that a brig was ashore on the rocks below the light. The keeper later learned that the sailor had faced almost certain death to get help for his shipmates. In 1852 the New Point Comfort Lighthouse in Virginia was run by a retired sea captain and his assistant, a woman slave.
A famous example of valor by an African American is that of the slave Assistant to the keeper of the Cape Florida Light on Key Biscayne, one of the oldest lighthouse towers in the United States. During the Seminole Indian Wars in 1836, Keeper John W.B. Thompson and his African American Assistant took refuge in the lighthouse, where they were besieged throughout the day and into the night. Musket shots at the attackers kept them from the tower until dark, when the Seminole Indians set fire to the door and the lowest plank-boarded window.
The flames were fierce, fed by yellow pine wood and oil cans punctured by the Indians’ shots, and the two men were driven to the top of the tower. The keeper cut away the stairs halfway up from the bottom and managed to confine the fire within the tower for a time by covering over the scuttle leading to the lantern. But the intense heat and flames drove the two men out of the lantern and down on the edge of a two-foot platform where they were nearly roasted alive.
Stretched out for momentary relief from cramping, the arms and legs of the victims were instant targets for the Indians’ shots from below. Gas from the flaming lantern burst in all directions. In desperation, Keeper Thompson threw a keg of gunpowder down the scuttle. It exploded instantly and shook the tower from top to bottom but failed to demolish the structure and the two men.
Shortly thereafter, the Assistant died of his wounds. As the keeper prepared to end his torture by jumping off the ledge, the fire fell to the bottom of the tower and a stiff breeze provided some relief. Assuming both men were dead, the Indians left the tower and set fire to the dwelling.
Severely burned and wounded, the keeper lay wounded far from the ground in an apparently hopeless position. He managed to make a signal from a piece of blood-soaked clothing that had not burned. Later in the day he sighted the schooner Motto and the sloop-of-war USS Concord, which had heard the explosion 12 miles off and had come to his assistance. After other rescue methods had failed, the rescuers fired twine from their muskets, fastened to a ramrod, with which the keeper managed to haul up a tail block and secure it to an iron stanchion. Two men were hoisted up and soon the keeper was lowered to the ground and given medical aid.
Thanks to the assistant who had given his life in defense of the lighthouse, and to the crews of Motto and Concord, Keeper Thompson, crippled for life, survived the harrowing experience. Rebuilding of the lighthouse after the Seminole attack was authorized in 1837. In 1855, the tower was raised to 95 feet. The lighting apparatus was destroyed in 1861 during the Civil War and was not restored until 1867.
The light continued to guide mariners as they passed the dangerous Florida Reef. On June 15, 1878, Fowey Rocks light was established and Cape Florida light was discontinued. The tower and property were sold in 1915 to the late James Deering of Chicago, Illinois. The structure where Keeper Thompson’s valiant Assistant died is carried in the current light list of the U.S. Coast Guard as "Cape Florida Daybeacon, white unused lighthouse tower, privately maintained."\
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