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Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
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Located seven miles southwest of Key West, the Sand Key Lighthouse replaced the lightship Honey, which marked Sand Key from 1848 to 1853. A hurricane in 1848 demolished an earlier lighthouse, constructed in 1827, killing the keeper and five others. George Meade, later a Union general, constructed the lighthouse, his second iron-pile structure in Florida. After a serious fire in 1989, structural repairs kept the lighthouse in service. Sand Key is little more than a sand bar today and the lighthouse is not open to the public. Its original first-order Fresnel lens is housed at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Groton, Connecticut.
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