If Mullet Key is the subject of this archive, Egmont Key is its mirror across the water. The two islands have always shared the mouth of Tampa Bay and the job of guarding it, and almost everything that happened to one happened, in some form, to the other. Egmont holds the lighthouse, the older fort, the deeper graves, and the harder story, and it is dying faster, eroding into the Gulf a little more with every storm, a visible forecast of what the sea intends for all these low keys.
The island took its name in 1763, when Britain acquired Florida, in honor of John Perceval, the second Earl of Egmont. Its importance was obvious from the first: it sat squarely at the entrance to the bay, the last land a ship passed before the open Gulf. As Gulf shipping grew, vessels kept grounding on the bars at the bay's mouth, and Congress funded a lighthouse, completed in 1848, the only light on the coast between St. Marks and Key West.
That first tower barely lasted a season. The Great Gale of 1848 swept over the island in September with a surge that buried it; the keeper rode out the storm with his family in a small boat tied to a tree, then rowed to Tampa and resigned, wanting no more of lighthouse keeping. The government rebuilt the tower in 1858, set further inland and made to withstand any storm, and that 1858 lighthouse still stands. The Coast Guard kept it manned until 1990, one of the last staffed lighthouses in the country, and beach renourishment in 2000 bought it some time against the encroaching Gulf.
Egmont holds a darker distinction. At the close of the Third Seminole War, in the late 1850s, the island was used as a holding camp for captured Seminoles awaiting forced shipment west to Indian Territory. The prisoners are believed to have included the well-known leader Billy Bowlegs. Many died on the island and are buried there, in what has been called the last act of the Trail of Tears. Within a few decades the United States would build, on this same island, a fort named for the officer whose death had begun the Seminole wars, a bitter symmetry the official histories rarely note.
When the Civil War came, the lighthouse became a prize. The wartime keeper, George V. Rickard, professed loyalty to the Union but was secretly a Confederate, and in August 1861 he smuggled the light's valuable lens and machinery away to Fort Brooke at Tampa and fled. The Floridians hid the apparatus so well it was not found again until after the war, and the light stayed dark until 1866. Union forces took the island in July 1861 and used the tower as a blockade lookout, and by early 1862 they had made Egmont a refuge for Southern Unionist families fleeing the Confederacy, some forty households who gave the Union intelligence on Confederate movements. This verified Union refugee camp on Egmont should not be confused with the unverified tale of a contraband camp on Mullet Key.
At the end of the century, Egmont got its fort. Fort Dade, named in the same 1900 War Department order that named Fort De Soto, was the long-range-gun half of a deliberate two-fort system: Egmont's heavy disappearing guns and Mullet Key's mortars were meant to fire in cooperation, their fields of fire interlocking across the bay's mouth. Fort Dade grew into a small town of some three hundred people, with brick streets, a railroad, electricity, a hospital, a movie theater, a bowling alley, and tennis courts. Deactivated in 1923 and briefly revived in the Second World War, it is a much-visited ghost town today, its brick avenues running off into the scrub and, increasingly, into the surf.
Egmont is not abandoned. It remains a working island, home base of the Tampa Bay bar pilots, who have been stationed here since 1926 and who still put out to board inbound ships and guide them up the long channel to the Port of Tampa, the same waters that George Gauld and Francisco Maria Celi first charted in the eighteenth century. It is an unbroken line of navigation running from 1757 to the present, the living continuation of everything the surveyors began.
Egmont Key is eroding fast, faster than anyone can hold back. Two of Fort Dade's batteries already sit underwater, roughly two hundred yards offshore, and the brick streets crumble into the Gulf a little more each year. The 1921 hurricane once drove some seventy-five people up into the lighthouse to escape the flooding. The Egmont Key Alliance, together with state and federal agencies, fights a holding action with rock and imported sand, but the island that helped guard the bay for a century and a half is slowly being erased. What is happening to Egmont is, in slow motion, what the Gulf intends for all of these low, sandy keys, Mullet Key included. To watch Egmont go is to see the future of the whole bar.