including stone water cisterns, and a graveyard whose headstones conspicuously date prior to 1896. Also, many of the eastern red cedar trees that originally attracted the pencil company, and for which the community was named, are gone. At the start of the 20th century, fishing, sponge hooking, and oystering had become the major industries, but around 1909, the oyster beds were exhausted. President Herbert Hoover established the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge in 1929 by naming three of the islands as a breeding ground for colonial birds. The lighthouse was abandoned in 1952, just as the tourism industry began to grow as a result of interest in the historic community, but it remains in use as a marine biology research center by the University of Florida in Gainesville. Present The old-fashioned fishing village is now a tourist center with several regionally famous seafood restaurants. The village holds two festivals a year, the Spring Sidewalk Art Festival and the Fall Seafood Festival, that each attract thousands of visitors to the area. In 1950, Hurricane Easy, a category-3 storm with winds, looped around Cedar Key three times before finally making landfall, dumping of rain and destroying two-thirds of the homes. The storm came ashore at low tide, so the surge was only . Hurricane Elena followed a similar path in 1985, but did not make landfall. Packing winds, the storm churned for two days in the Gulf, to the west, battering the waterfront. All the businesses and restaurants on Dock Street were either damaged or destroyed, and a section of the seawall collapsed. After a statewide ban on large-scale net fishing went into effect July 1, 1995, a government retraining program helped many local fishermen begin farming clams in the muddy waters. Today, Cedar Key's clam-based aquaculture is a multimillion-dollar industry. A local museum exhibit displays a reproduction of one of the first air conditioning installations. The system, with compressor and fans, was used in Cedar Key to ease the lot of malaria patients. Cedar Key is home to the George T. Lewis Airport (CDK). Hurricane Eta made one of its two landfalls in Florida at about 4 a.m. Thursday, November 10, 2020, near Cedar Key, as a tropical storm. National historic status Cedar Key's importance in Florida's history, which began as far back as 1000 BC with pre-Columbian habitation of the region, was recognized on October 3, 1989, by the federal