[Times photos: Dirk Shadd]
Gregory Wilson, a founding member and past president of the Egmont Key Alliance, walks through the Battery Charles Mellon on Egmont Key. The battery was built in 1898.
Palm trees lie on the beach at Egmont Key with the power generator and ice house building in the background. The building ws deliberately imploded, because it posed an erosion hazard.
EGMONT KEY - In its time, which ran from 1899 to 1923, the U.S. Army's installation on Egmont Key was as cutting-edge as you could get.
The tiny island, just southwest of the southern tip of Pinellas County, bristled with batteries of big guns that defended Tampa Bay from an invader who never came.
It was an impressive setup made possible by new technologies of longer, rifled cannon barrels, breech loaders and a slower-burning powder (to push the shells all the way up and out the barrel). The guns had new "disappearing" carriages - on the recoil, they kicked back down below the enemy's sight.
Crack squadrons staffed five gun batteries on Egmont, from 8-inchers with a range of several miles down to 3-inch rapid loaders to strafe lighter craft stealing past in shallow waters. Targeting was a precise science, based on observations called in from tall towers.
Yet the base, soon renamed Fort Dade, had outlived its purpose almost from the start. Like Fort De Soto across the channel on the mainland, it was planned during the Spanish-American War. But the first troops didn't arrive until a month after the peace treaty was signed. Fort Dade was abandoned outright in 1923.
This Saturday and Sunday will mark the sixth "Discover the Island" event organized by the Egmont Key Alliance, a citizens' group that supports the island. The alliance is offering boat rides to Egmont Key and four different tours of the island (historical, military, beach dynamics, nature). The net proceeds will go to park improvements.
Tickets are $15 apiece kids 6 or younger are free and can be bought online at www.egmontkey.org through tonight, or in person where the boats will depart from Fort De Soto Park. Fort De Soto is at the southern end of Pinellas County - take the Pinellas Bayway exit off Interstate 275, and then follow the signs to Fort De Soto and the yellow signs to the event.
Protect yourself from the sun, don't bring alcohol or pets, and be forewarned: There's a limited number of port-a-johns.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took over the island in the 1970s, and the Florida Park Service took on its co-management as a state park in 1989. The park is young and unfinished.
"This whole place," says Richard Johnson, president of the 135-member Egmont Key Alliance, "is a treasure chest of natural and historic resources."
The island is about 1.7 miles long, north to south. The southern three-quarters is a national wildlife refuge. Many kinds of birds - terns, black skimmers and American oystercatchers - are here. Gopher tortoises and Eastern box turtles peer at you cautiously along the path edges.
Unfortunately, the gulf side of the island is disappearing.
Erosion threatens the island's historic heritage and habitat for endangered species. Already, one of the three remaining gun batteries has collapsed into the sand. The outer ranks of palms and palmettos - alive only a few months ago - now stand in dead gray rows, the sand disappearing around them, their frontmost members already toppled and strewn across the beach like dead soldiers.
Park volunteers have performed heroic labor in recent years. Most importantly, they cleared the island of a jungle of Brazilian pepper, that accursed non-native invader, and uncovered the old gun batteries and building foundations. They have fought another invader, the Australian pine, to a draw. They have installed huge, permeable "geotubes" - sort of like long sandbags - to slow beach erosion.
The earliest Spanish explorers of Florida marked Egmont Key on their charts. The island was renamed for the Earl of Egmont in the 1700s. In the 1840s, a young Army lieutenant colonel scouting the Tampa Bay area marked it down as a strategic site - his name was Robert E. Lee. The lighthouse on the island, still operating today as an aircraft warning, was erected in 1859.
Richard Johnson's dream is that one day Egmont Key will feature a visitors' center and interpretive history museum and trails. The original Fort Dade guardhouse has been partly restored for the purpose.
After all, he says, Egmont has been associated with every major part of our region's heritage. In that sense, the history of Egmont Key is the history of Tampa Bay.
Palm trees lie on the beach at Egmont Key with the power generator and ice house building in the background. The building ws deliberately imploded, because it posed an erosion hazard.
