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In 1960, as a memento of his boyhood years at Florida’s Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, where his father, Hamilton “Hamp” Sharpe Perry, was a lighthouse keeper, John L. Perry built this model of the historic lighthouse. This photograph, now in the archives of Lighthouse Digest, appeared in a Miami newspaper on December 4, 1960. At that time, John Perry said he had vivid memories of the hurricane of 1929 when waves swept over the lighthouse.
Roberta Perry Hughes, who is a paternal granddaughter of keeper Hamilton Perry, recently recalled that her uncle, John Perry, who was a 48-year old truck driver at the time this photo was taken, was an extremely talented man. Although he never studied art, he had an eye for detail and could create scale models of just about anything he saw or had a photograph to work from. She said he also made a large model of the RMS Titanic that was on display when the movie Titanic, starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, was released in 1953.
The model of the Titanic still exists and is in the possession of family members, but, sadly, the Fowey Rocks Lighthouse model deteriorated and was discarded.
The Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, built in 1878 to replace the Cape Florida Lighthouse, was automated in 1974. The giant lens that was once used in the lighthouse was removed from the structure and is now on display at the Coast Guard Aids to Navigation School in Yorktown, Virginia.
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