The House Of Refuge

I first saw the House of Refuge Museum back in 1975, when my mother Mary and father Nelson and I drove down to Stuart, Florida to see if my parents might want to retire there. My Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bill had already moved to Stuart a few years earlier, and showed us around the area, including the House of Refuge Museum, which was a lifesaving station built back in 1876 to rescue sailors whose boats shipwrecked on Gilbert's Bar, located just 100 yards offshore. The sailors would live in the upstairs attic until a ship arrived to take them back to civilization. I took the photograph on the left of my mother standing at the entrance of the place when we visited it one day many years later.

The photograph on the right I took the last time I was down in Stuart, getting my mother's condo (which my sister Susan and I now own) ready to rent out, which for better or worse has been leased for the past 4 years. Hard to pop down for a visit these days if someone is living there. I am sure our tenants would object to us dropping in for a few weeks, even if we did bring our own sleeping bags and crashed on the living room floor. In any case, the House of Refuge is located on a coral reef just down the way from Stuart Beach, and is a wonderfully peaceful spot, especially at sunset. It is well past time to pay another visit.