House of Refuge

In 1876 the United States built ten houses of refuge along the empty Florida coast, each with a keeper whose job was to walk the beach after a storm and bring in whoever the sea had thrown up. The one at Gilbert’s Bar is the only one left. It stands on the rock at the south end of Hutchinson Island where it was built, a white wooden house with a wide porch, a boathouse full of surfboats and a lookout tower from the Second World War, and the surf still breaks on the Anastasia rock below it.

Inside, the rooms are furnished as the keeper’s family lived in them, with the ledger of wrecks and rescues on the desk, and the boathouse holds the lifesaving gear and the story of the German U-boats that watched this coast in 1942. It is a small museum, an hour at most, and one of the strangest and best on the coast.

The rock shelf below the house is the one that makes Bathtub Reef a few hundred yards south; walk it at low tide after your visit.

Good to know

• Allow an hour; the house, the boathouse and the rock are the whole visit.
• Sunday opens at 1 pm; check the current hours before a long drive.
• The porch is the place to be when a front brings big surf.
• Parking is in the lot across the road; the walk is short.
• Combined tickets with the Elliott Museum are sold at both.