Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park

Cape Florida was the southern terminus of a different Underground Railroad — the saltwater one. Before the lighthouse went up, the southern tip of Key Biscayne was the secret port where fugitives from slavery and Black Seminoles gathered to board dugouts and Bahamian wreckers for the British Bahamas — an estimated three hundred people escaping through the Cape between the 1820s and the war. The route ran south to freedom, not north.

The lighthouse that now defines the cape — first lit in 1825, the oldest standing structure in Miami-Dade — was itself the thing that closed the route: the light exposed the rendezvous. In 1836 the tower survived a Seminole attack during the Second Seminole War; rebuilt and raised to ninety-five feet, it watched the coast until decommissioning in 1878.

The park exists because an editor fought for it — Bill Baggs of the Miami News, the civil-rights champion who led the campaign against development on the cape in the 1960s. The state bought the land in 1966; the Network to Freedom designation came in 2004. The lighthouse keeps its double meaning — the beacon that blocked the escapes and the landmark on the ground where they happened.

Bill Baggs Cape Florida is the archive's saltwater file — the Key Biscayne point where the saltwater Underground Railroad carried three hundred fugitives to the Bahamas, under the 1825 lighthouse whose light ended the route.