Ancote Keys Lighthouse: Guiding Light to Safe Anchorage

• Main Author: Mohlman, Geoffrey
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: STARS 2022
• Subjects: American Studies; United States History; Anchorage; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol78/iss2/3; https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4241&context=fhq

Lighthouse. The term conjures mixed images--from the romantic to the horrific--of solitude, dense fog, blood-thirsty ghosts seeking revent, gold-hungry pirates, reliability, safety, kissing lovers silhouetted by a beautiful sunset, or of a light keeping fighting the frigid raging waters of the North Atlantic in a seemingly futile attempt to save a shipwrecked damsel. Thanks to films such as John Carpenter's The Fog or Steve Sekely's 1963 science fiction classic Day of the Triffids, many of these visions persists in the American imagination. Although the noted lighthouse historian Francis Ross Holland Jr. asked forgiveness "for puncturing a few balloons of [lighthouse] romance," the balloons that remained afloat are as important as those that crashed to the ground.1