Cape Florida Lighthouse

This guide to the Cape Florida Lighthouse traces a single day in July 1836, when Assistant Keeper John Thompson and an enslaved worker named Aaron Carter, alone at the station, sprinted for the tower door as Seminole warriors closed in and turned the key just ahead of them. You'll hear how the two men held the windows through the day as attackers surrounded the base, with two hundred twenty-five gallons of lamp oil sitting in tanks below. It follows how high up the tower they were forced before the standoff broke.