There are brief accounts of a stone tower the Spanish built (now long gone) close by the quarries. The tower apparently would have afforded a sea view. Some scholars have asserted that if the Spanish on any occasion placed torches in this tower, the structure would have been thus functioning as the first lighthouse in the New World. In any case, limestone quarried here by the Spanish did eventually help to make a lighthouse here—the St. Marks Light, constructed about 1830 by the U.S. government. The lighthouse stands, after a couple of reconstructions, at the mouth of the river six miles from town and accessible by road. The lighthouse is, like San Marcos de Apalache, on the National Register of Historic Places.