The Cape St. George Light is a high brick lighthouse which had originally stood for 153 years on St. George Island, Florida, until toppling into the Gulf of Mexico October 22, 2005. The pieces of the lighthouse were retrieved, and in April 2008, the light's restoration was completed. History The first lighthouse on St. George Island was erected in 1833 near the island's western tip. It marked the narrow entrance to Apalachicola Bay at West Pass between St. George Island and St. Vincent Island. At the time, Apalachicola was an important cotton port. The tower was 65 feet (20 m) tall, and held 13 lamps with reflectors (although the captain of a revenue cutter reported in 1834 that the tower was tall and had 11 lamps). Due to the sharp convex bend of St. George Island's southern coast at Cape St. George, southeast of the light, ships approaching from the eastern Gulf could not easily see it. In 1847 Congress appropriated $8,000 for a new lighthouse on the cape, southeast of the original site. Materials from the old tower were used in the construction of the new tower in 1847–48. It was built on a foundation of bricks just deep. A hurricane in the fall of 1850 undermined it, and the fourth hurricane of the 1851 Atlantic hurricane season toppled the tower in August of that year. The nearby lighthouses at Cape San Blas and Dog Island were destroyed by the same hurricane, and Apalachicola was heavily damaged. The Cape St. George lighthouse was rebuilt in 1851–52, inland from its previous site; construction was hastened by the salvage and re-use of two thirds of the bricks of the ruined tower. This third lighthouse on St. George Island was erected on a foundation of pine pilings driven deep into the sand, with walls of hydraulic cement thick at the bottom and tapering to at the top. It was lit with a third-order Fresnel lens that was visible (given its elevation above sea level) to a shipboard observer up to out to sea. As with other lights that came under Confederate control during the Civil War, the lens and other components of the Cape St. George Light were protectively removed, first to Apalachicola, then further inland. Union naval forces captured Apalachicola in April 1862, but the light remained dark. The lens was found at the end of the war and reinstalled. The