USF is digitally preserving Egmont Key's historic harbor pilot village

By Paul Guzzo, University Communications and Marketing

Egmont Key is best known as a popular boating destination, a Florida State Park and national wildlife refuge.

But, for more than a century, it’s also quietly been home to a village of cottages where harbor pilots have stayed while awaiting the call to guide large cargo and passenger ships throughout Tampa Bay’s channels, including to and from Port Tampa Bay, Port St. Pete, SeaPort Manatee and dozens of private terminals.

Now, due to the damage the village incurred during back-to-back hurricanes, the pilots may never again have a presence on the Hillsborough County-owned island at the mouth of Tampa Bay.

“It’s hard,” said Captain Jack Timmel, the Tampa Bay Pilot Association’s manager who followed in his father Captain John Timmel’s footsteps. “That’s why we’re so thankful for what USF is doing.”

The Access 3D Lab at the University of South Florida has completed a 3D scan of the damaged village.

Because of that work, there will always be an intricate visual history of the village, and the lab hopes to one day turn that data into a virtual tour for the public.

Last summer, the lab made plans to begin scanning the village later this year when it was still in pristine condition, but Hurricane Helene struck first.

Waves washed over the village. One of the 18 houses was swept out to sea. Several were ripped from their foundations and moved as far as 200 feet.

Hurricane Milton’s winds then brought more destruction.

“In a perfect world, we would have scanned the village before anything was damaged,” lab director Laura Harrison said. “There is not much left of the village, but these scans will allow the histories connected to this place to endure.”

The history

From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, Egmont Key was home to Fort Dade, now a historical landmark, which was a military base established to protect the area against the potential threat of a Spanish naval invasion. An estimated 300 members of the military were stationed on the island. The infrastructure included 70 buildings — a bakery, stable, general store and even a bowling alley. Much of that is now gone or crumbling.

Beginning in 1886, the pilots used the island’s lighthouse as headquarters. In 1926, they then established the village on the eastern shores and then closed that section of the island to the public.

“Egmont Key is such a unique part of local history,” Harrison said. “That’s why we have to preserve its story in any way that we can. Other than a lone park ranger, the pilots are the only people who have stayed overnight on Egmont Key since the 1900s. They bore witness to so many of the layers of history that have transpired on Egmont Key.”

The village functions like a fire station for the state-regulated, privately hired pilots who work two weeks at a time. Once clocked in, their name goes to the bottom of the on-call pilot list and moves up as ships come in. The cottages provided them with a vital place to rest while waiting.

When John Timmel became a pilot in 1989, he purchased his village cottage from a retiring pilot.

Since then, the association began buying back and maintaining the structures collectively. So, upon his retirement in 2021, John Timmel sold his cottage to the association, which then passed the use on to his son, who became a pilot in 2015.

The Timmel house is currently uninhabitable. During Hurricane Helene, water rose as high as three feet inside. But it also fared the best due to a front deck anchored to the ground by two palm trees. This seems to have prevented the structure from being displaced.

“I raised my four kids here,” John Timmel said as he packed up his family’s personal items at the cottage. “We’d occasionally stay here on weekends. We once spent several weeks here during the summer while work was being done on our Tampa home. This village is a part of my family.”

Preserving history

Using 3D lidar scanners, a geographic information system and 360 imaging, the USF lab is dedicated to digitally preserving at-risk historic sites. In recent years, they have done so throughout the world in nations including Turkey, Serbia, Malta and Italy.

Since 2019, a local focus of their efforts has been Egmont Key, which has lost more than half of the 580 acres it measured in the 1800s. Due to ongoing erosion, it may eventually disappear.

The lab has been digitally preserving what is left, which includes the few remaining military ruins and the well-preserved lighthouse that date back to 1858.

With the association’s permission, Harrison and her lab team of Alex Fawbush and Brooke Hansen were on the island days after Hurricane Helene struck.

They spent hours scanning the village and planned to return a few weeks later to complete the job.

But, before they could, Hurricane Milton unleashed winds exceeding 100 miles per hour across Egmont Key, further devastating the structures. During that storm, a cottage lost the one-story-high stilts on which it was built, leaving the structure on the ground, with a two-story exterior staircase that once abutted the front door now leading to nothing.

The lab returned Feb. 14 to complete the scans while the Timmels packed up.

“The damage wrought by the storms was much worse than anything I could have imagined,” said Harrison, whose upcoming book with Hansen, "The Disappearing Island," explores the history of Egmont Key and how digital technologies can help address the problem of at-risk heritage sites and invigorate tourism. “But it’s still important to document changes to cultural heritage over time and also preserve whatever memories we have.”

She compared the village scans to the Egmont Key military ruin scans that have already been incorporated into a virtual reality tour.

Using the data from the village scans, the cottages could also be digitally reconstructed to appear as they did before the hurricanes.

“The cottages may be damaged, but at least they are still there,” Harrison said. “That might not be the case forever. Now they are documented.”

Now what?

Prior to Hurricane Helene, the Tampa Bay area had not experienced a direct hit from such a storm in over a century.

The association, which currently represents 22 pilots, understood that it was only a matter of time before the area’s luck ran out and that the village would likely cease operations once that occurred.

“We hoped it wouldn’t be so soon,” Jack Timmel said. “But we were making preparations for when it happened. We understood that it no longer makes sense to have the entirety of our operations on a small island in a hurricane-prone state.”

Currently, the pilots are utilizing a temporary space at Tierra Verde Marina.                                                                                      

The association is now accelerating plans to construct a new headquarters with rest facilities near the base of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

As for the village, if it is not utilized by the pilots in the future, the Timmels would like to see it put to some good public use, potentially it cleaned up, made safe for tourists, and transformed into a museum dedicated to the pilots.

“No one knows for sure what will happen next,” Jack Timmel said. “If this is the end, at least it will live on virtually because of USF.”