House of Refuge Museum in Martin County, Florida

Photograph: The House of Refuge Museum at Gilbert's Bar.jpg by Lea Shanley · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Martin County attraction

House of Refuge Museum

Martin County · Atlantic Coast

The oldest building in Martin County, built in 1876 at 301 Southeast MacArthur Boulevard on Hutchinson Island.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The Treasury Department put up ten houses of refuge along the Atlantic coast of Florida for the United States Life-Saving Service, spaced out so that a sailor cast ashore on an empty beach might reach shelter and food on foot. This is the only one of the ten still standing. A keeper and his family lived here year round and walked the beach after storms. Captain William E. Rea was keeper around 1904 and took in survivors from the wreck of the Georges Valentine, which still lies just offshore. In 1915 it became Coast Guard Station 207 under Axel Johansen and his wife Kate. Home Guard men were quartered here in the First World War and it served as a lookout for enemy submarines in the Second. Martin County owns the building and leases it to the county historical society, which runs it as a museum. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on May 3, 1974

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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