Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse

At just past noon on June 2, 1884, the Light-House Service tender, the schooner Pharos, anchored near the channel buoy off the bar at Mosquito Inlet, today known as Ponce De Leon Inlet, just south of Daytona Beach, Florida. From the rail of the vessel, forty-nine-year-old General Orville E. Babcock gazed at the spit of land to the west, shimmering under the high, hot summer sun.