Historic Egmont Key brig gets a new roof
A group that wants to turn the restored building into a visitors center has tile and a contractor, now it needs money.
By ANDREW MEACHAM
Published November 24, 2004
EGMONT KEY - You can't beat the view from the porch of the old guardhouse to the water. But the square building, part of a turn-of-the-century military installation, never housed willing residents.
It was a jail.
Now 23 shrink-wrapped pallets, each weighing about a ton, sit on either side of the guardhouse. They contain roofing tiles of baked clay, an approximation of the original roof put on by the Army in 1911. Organizers at the Egmont Key Alliance, a citizens support group, even found the same Chicago supplier, Ludowici Roof Tile.
The roof will cover a visitors education center or museum, with exhibits on the natural habitat and human history of Egmont Key, the state park that lies 11/2 miles off Fort De Soto. In recent years the alliance has spent more than $400,000 in state grants to restore the foundation, floor and walls of the guardhouse (an Army synonym for "brig"), add power and air conditioning, and build a new roof. The group has lined up a contractor but lacks the approximately $70,000 needed to do the job.
Still, all parties seem to consider getting $30,000 worth of tile to the island a major victory, requiring a year's worth of phone calls between county, state and federal agencies.
To begin with, the federal government owns Egmont Key, although the state co-manages the property as a park with a full-time staff of one. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service owns about 80 percent of the island, much of which is a wildlife refuge. The Coast Guard owns nearly all the rest, and maintains the lighthouse on the northern end.
The Pinellas County Utilities Program volunteered the Tortuga, a boat used for building artificial reefs, to move the tile from Bayboro Harbor. Planners found the Tortuga useful for its mounted crane and its function as a landing craft. Crew members beached the boat, then offloaded the pallets onto a forklift.
Standing in the middle of nowhere, the guardhouse with tar paper sheeting on the roof looks as original as planners could muster. A core group of a dozen or fewer within the alliance has driven the guardhouse project with state and federal help, alliance president Richard Johnson said.
"It looked like a real good opportunity, rather than building a piece of modern infrastructure there, to help interpret the historic background of the island," said Johnson, 57, who helps run waterfront programs at Eckerd College.
With a view of the beach and an endless expanse of sunlit water, the guardhouse today looks like real estate to die for. But it was once one of 70 buildings in Fort Dade, a coastal defense camp begun in 1898, when William McKinley was president. As any Egmont visitor will learn, the country feared invading warships, particularly from Spain. Both shipping channels were mined, the mines protected by long guns 3 inches in diameter.
"It was that generation's defensive paranoid nightmare, if you will, that a fleet of those things would arrive off the coast and attack the Port of Tampa or the community," Johnson said.
The government declared the guns obsolete in 1920, and shut the fort down three years later. The barracks, officers club, post office and tennis court all collapsed and disappeared. The concrete lockup remained, although without a roof.
When resurrected as a visitor's center, the guardhouse will offer both natural and historical sides of the island's uniqueness, its organizers hope. Some of the exhibits will focus on nesting birds such as terns and gulls that depend on Egmont Key, said John Kasbohm, of the federal Fish and Wildlife office in Crystal River. Loggerhead sea turtles bury their eggs at Egmont each spring, and the island crawls with gopher tortoises.
Other exhibits will show the human timeline beginning with the Spanish explorers who landed on Egmont Key in the early 1500s. The U.S. Lighthouse Service built a lighthouse in 1848, but lost it to a hurricane the same year.
The project moves forward in increments, depending on the coordination among many partners and the sometimes difficult logistics of building on an island. The desire to preserve a natural resource motivates some volunteers in the Egmont Key Alliance, Johnson said, while others are more interested in the island's history.
"It's a pretty place," he said. "It's an intriguing and complicated place."