Lighthouse group to buy relic of Ponce Inlet's fishing village days

Before there was a town in Ponce Inlet, before there was a lighthouse in Ponce Inlet, there was a wood-frame building on the banks of the Halifax River, the Pacetti House.

On Thursday, the director of the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse Museum announced that Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association had contracted to buy the historic building and the 3.2 acres it sits on for $1.7 million.

“We’ve tried to acquire this property for over three decades,” said the lighthouse’s executive director, Ed Gunn.

“This is an opportunity to protect one of the oldest buildings in the county,” said Ellen Henry, the lighthouse museum’s curator. “We’re so excited I can't even express it. It’s been a dream of mine since I started working at the lighthouse.”

The Pacetti House was named for Bartola Clemente Pacetti, a descendant of the 18th-century New Smryna Minorcan colonists and a larger-than-life figure in town history. He arrived in the 1840s and worked as a salvor, riverboat pilot, fisherman, hunting and fishing guide, hotel operator … whatever needed doing.

And in 1884, Pacetti sold some of his land to the federal government for $400 as the site for a new lighthouse to be built on the north side of Mosquito Inlet, as Ponce de Leon Inlet was then called. He used the proceeds to build the Pacetti House. (It's also was called the Pacetti Hotel, but The News-Journal called it “Pacetti House” in the 1910s and 1920s and I’ll just go with what our long-ago editors decided.)

Pacetti already had built himself a house on the lot just after the Civil War, and when he built the new place, he incorporated part of the old house into the new hotel, according to Henry.

Surprisingly, building a little hotel on a frontier riverfront in the middle of nowhere paid off for Pacetti and his family. First, they hosted lighthouse construction workers, but soon Mosquito Inlet, despite its uninviting name, became a draw for sport fishermen from all over. The fishing here was legendary. It was written up guidebooks.

Pacetti’s wife, Martha Jane, may have married young (she was in her mid-teens; Bartola was in his late 30s at the time), but she knew her way around a stove and served up fish and oysters to hotel guests and diners. Her poached sheepshead fish in egg sauce was famous.

She continued running the place after her husband died in 1898, but after her death in 1917, the family closed the hotel and sold it in 1920. By then, the town was in decline as a sport-fishing destination. Wealthier sportsmen had moved on to more exotic locales, and in 1936, the hotel was bought by Olivia Gamble, daughter of James Gamble of Procter and Gamble. Her late father loved his stays at the Pacetti House back in its heyday, so this was a sentimental purchase.

The house bounced among Gamble heirs until 2009 when it was acquired by the Greenacres Foundation. The foundation, founded by Gamble family heirs, had announced plans in 2011 for turning the property into an educational center, a project some applauded but which some longtime residents feared would alter a local landmark beyond recognition.

Nothing much materialized of the plan, and now the foundation is selling the property to the Ponce De Leon Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association.

Gunn said the property is “a perfect fit” for the lighthouse museum and it’s easy to see why. It’s across the street from the lighthouse land; it’s an integral part of the lighthouse’s story; and it’s the oldest house in town.

The next steps, according to Henry, are stabilizing the long-vacant house, getting it on the National Register of Historic Places, and figuring how best to present it to the public. Projects that will require even more money. “We’re looking for historic preservation champions within the community to help us,” said Gunn.

Between condo construction and hurricanes, it’s amazing that a little wooden waterfront hotel like this has survived all these years. It’s a reminder of the time when what’s now Ponce Inlet was a tiny speck of a fishing village, sought out by gentlemen outdoorsmen looking for a place remote from the world.