Before the channel was a string of lighted electronic buoys, it was a job for men who lived alone over the water. The Mullet Key Shoal Light stood off the southwest end of the island to warn ships away from the shallow bank that guards the entrance to Tampa Bay, and for at least a quarter century its lamp was kept burning by just three men, two of them father and son. Their names and dates survive in the keepers' registers, a quiet human record running alongside the soldiers and the surveyors.
Mullet Key Shoal is the submerged sand bank reaching out from the southwest tip of the island into the approaches of the main ship channel, exactly the sort of hazard that has wrecked vessels at the mouth of Tampa Bay since the first Spanish hulls felt their way in. The shoal light marked it, a navigational aid in the same family as the larger Egmont Key lighthouse across the channel, one more point of reference for a pilot bringing a ship in from the Gulf. Tending such a light was lonely, exacting, and unglamorous work: keep the lamp lit and the lens clean every night of the year, log the weather, and endure the isolation, the heat, and the storms that come with a structure planted out in open water.
The first keeper in the record was William Bahrt, born in 1835. He was appointed Principal Keeper of the Mullet Key Shoal Light in 1895, at a salary of five hundred and fifty dollars a year, and he held the post until his death in 1899. He died, as the register notes plainly, in office, having kept the light for the last four years of his life. He was sixty-four.
The keeping of the light passed from father to son. Carl W. Bahrt, born in 1880, succeeded William as Principal Keeper of the Mullet Key Shoal Light in 1899, the same year his father died, and held it until 1909. Over that decade his salary climbed from the same five hundred and fifty dollars his father had earned to a thousand dollars a year, a measure of how the Lighthouse Service slowly came to value the men who held its remote stations. The record links him to the Indian Hill light in the same period as well. He outlived his father by decades, dying in 1937.
The third keeper was Edward I. Pillsbury, born in 1873, who had come up through the service the hard way. He kept the Southwest Channel light from 1905 to 1909 before taking over the Mullet Key Shoal Light in 1909, and he held that post until at least 1921, his pay rising over those years to nearly two thousand dollars. He finished his career tending the Tampa Bay beacons and died in 1925. With Pillsbury the named record of the shoal's keepers runs out, as automation and lighted buoys began, here as everywhere, to make the solitary human keeper a thing of the past.
The keepers of the Mullet Key Shoal Light never fought a battle or charted a coast, and not one of them is famous. But theirs is exactly the kind of life that vanishes from history if no one writes it down: ordinary working men who spent years of their lives out over the water at the mouth of the bay, keeping a small light burning so that other men's ships would not go aground. Two generations of one family, the Bahrts, and one veteran of the lonely channel stations, Pillsbury, between them covered the better part of three decades. They are in this archive because a complete history of these waters owes them that much.