Ponce Inlet Lighthouse
— a brick column that has been counting nights since 1887.
Not only on a wall.
Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A 175-foot red-brick tower at the mouth of Ponce de Leon Inlet, the tallest lighthouse in Florida and the second tallest in the United States. It was lit on November 1, 1887, after eighteen years of construction and one earlier collapse. The first-order Fresnel lens is back in the lantern after a long restoration. The keeper's cottages on the grounds are now a small, exact museum.
The place, in three passes.
The Ponce de Leon Inlet Light stands at the south end of the peninsula that ends Daytona Beach, on the north bank of Ponce de Leon Inlet where the Halifax River meets the Atlantic. The tower is 175 feet tall, the tallest lighthouse in Florida and the second tallest in the United States, behind only Cape Hatteras. It was first lit on November 1, 1887. The site is a National Historic Landmark and is operated by the non-profit Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association, which restored the keeper's cottages and the lens building over four decades of work beginning in 1972.
The tower is a double brick column: an outer wall of red brick twelve feet thick at the base and a smaller inner cylinder that carries the cast-iron spiral stair. About 1.25 million bricks went into the structure, most of them barged south from Alabama and St. Augustine after an earlier wooden lighthouse on the same inlet collapsed into the surf in 1836. Construction of the current tower began in 1883 under the engineer Francis Hopkinson Smith and finished four years later. The lantern room houses a first-order Fresnel lens, the largest order of lens the Lighthouse Board ever commissioned.
The lighthouse and museum are open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the last admission at 5 p.m. Admission is $7.95 for adults and $1.95 for children ages 3-11 as of the most recent published rate. The climb is 203 cast-iron steps to the watch room and a short ladder to the gallery. Three keeper's cottages on the grounds hold the museum: maritime history, Fresnel-lens science, and the daily life of a turn-of-the-century light keeper. There is a small picnic area and free parking at the gate.
