The new keeper of the Anclote Key Lighthouse is stepping into history and making some of her own.
By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published September 11, 2003
[Times photos: Scott Keeler]
Graham, who has never lost an election, has been visible lately.
"When you're out here and it gets quiet, and there's a fog here you could step into any time you want."
- CONNIE WIESEHAN, Incoming lighthouse keeper
ANCLOTE KEY - There's something about the lighthouse here. It has been dark for years, but people still remember its blaze.
Sometimes Connie Wiesehan gets calls from the old-timers who remember when. They tell her about the brutal storms. They show her sepia-toned photos of the sturdy men with hawk-eyed gazes who guarded the light, rain or shine.
In a few months, Wiesehan, a state park ranger, will join that group. Come December she'll be hauling a month's worth of food and water ashore. She'll be humping up 105 steps to the top of the lighthouse to inspect the lantern if something goes wrong.
That's what lighthouse keepers do. They keep going. They keep that light on. "No matter where you are, you got bumps and hitches you just have to deal with," Wiesehan said with a shrug.
Wiesehan, 56, will join a long list of people who have maintained the light since it was built 116 years ago. Restoration of the cast-iron structure was completed in August. Workers installed a high-intensity quartz light that will flash every 20 seconds.
Now seafarers and landlubbers alike will celebrate the lighthouse's relighting during a ceremony and concert from 5:30 to 11 p.m. Saturday at Sunset Beach in Tarpon Springs. The event is a fundraiser to help rebuild two keepers' homes on the island for museum and educational programs.
The tower has had many guardians over the years, not all of them lighthouse keepers. Citizens and lighthouse enthusiasts worked for years to persuade state legislators to help bring the light back. In the end, the roughly $1.5-million project used state and federal money and local donations.
Since the 1980s, members of the Tampa Bay Harbour Lights collector club and the Gulf Islands Alliance Citizens Support Organization helped raise money for the restoration.
It wasn't an easy job.
Arsonists burned down the two wood buildings the lighthouse keepers once called home. Gunfire shattered glass panels in the lantern house. Spray-painted declarations of love and teenage glory defaced the lighthouse walls.
"I have nightmares of what it looked like before," said Lary McSparren, president of the Gulf Islands Alliance. "It was hideous."
McSparren and his wife, Pat, have worked on the restoration for about a decade. It was their letter to U.S. Rep. Mike Bilirakis, R-Tarpon Springs, and calls to former state Sen. Jack Latvala that got the ball rolling.
"It was so rundown and so vandalized that the vision of seeing it back as it originally was captured all of our hearts," said Wayne Hawes, president of both the Tampa Bay Harbour Lights collector club and the Florida Lighthouse Association.
Only one year to build
Though it took present-day supporters about 20 years to get the lighthouse up and running again, it took workers less than a year to build its skeletal cast-iron pipe structure in 1887.
Using cast-iron in lighthouses became popular in the mid 19th century after engineers discovered that masonry towers typical in New England could not withstand the force of Florida's hurricane season.
The island home of the lighthouse is part of the Anclote Key State Preserve, steeped in history. French and Spanish pirates once used Anclote Key to launch raids in 1682, according to researchers.
In the late 1880s, the island proved the perfect location for a lighthouse to guide passing ships as well as Tarpon Springs fishermen and sponge divers.
Until 1952, the lighthouse was manned by a keeper and his assistant. An exclusively male cadre of civil servants, they typically lived on the island year-round and raised families there.
Their lives were far from romantic. They spent most of their days painting, mending fences, hauling oil up to the lantern room and doing general repair work. They were outside most of the day fighting off armies of vampiric mosquitoes. For all that, they earned an average of about $600 a year.
Low earnings were offset by free room and board. Keepers also economized by hunting, fishing and raising chickens and hogs. Despite the isolation, low wages and hard labor, Anclote Key's 15 lighthouse guardians tried hard to keep up appearances.
They made frequent visits to Tarpon Springs and were well-known in the community, said Brent Weisman, a University of South Florida anthropology professor who led an archaeological survey of the island.
"They were really trying to maintain a middle-class lifestyle," Weisman said. "Although they lived on the island, they didn't want to appear like Robinson Crusoe."
So they ate off of fine china, bought imported English beer and hobnobbed with the locals who visited Anclote Key for Sunday picnics. The men who manned the lighthouse were respected and rugged pioneers, but they were also seekers.
"Different types of people did this job," Weisman said. "Some were homesteaders. Some were outlaws looking to eke out a living out on the island where no one can find them."
Wiesehan is the first caretaker in more than 50 years and the first female. She is no outlaw. But she considers herself a homesteader.
The central air conditioning, satellite dish, and washer and dryer she will install once the ranger's house is built in December will bear little resemblance to early 20th century technology.
She won't even have to maintain the lighthouse lamp unless the diesel generator that charges its batteries breaks down. But she and her boyfriend, Jim Stouder, 63, will still have to battle the bugs and the long days of solitude.
"I enjoy the peace and quiet," Wiesehan said. "When you're out here and it gets quiet, and there's a fog here you could step into any time you want."
Six years ago, she traded in the humdrum of a print shop office cubicle. Now she plans to use some of the skills she learned growing up on a farm in northern Indiana to survive.
"You have to kinda do a MacGyver and fix it yourself," Wiesehan said. "You just learn to adjust."
- Researcher Mary Mellstrom contributed to this report.
