Sabine Bank Lighthouse with foghorn Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

In the Gulf of Mexico, roughly sixteen miles south of the entrance to the Sabine River, Sabine Bank lies hidden a mere twenty feet below the surface of the water. In 1888, Congressman William H. Crain proposed a lightship for Sabine Bank, which measures about thirty miles long and five miles wide, but the district lighthouse engineer in New Orleans didn’t see the need for such a measure. A decade later, the Lighthouse Board finally did recommend the construction of a lighthouse to warn the numerous deep-drafted vessels now calling at Port Arthur of the potential offshore danger, and Congress appropriated $40,000 in 1900 and 1901 for the project. The action was taken too late for the British steamship Athena, the steamer Athena, and the Italian vessel Fratelli Gazolli, which all ran aground on the bank over a two-year span from 1899 to 1901.

The lowest bid submitted for the job was from the Russel Iron and Foundry Company of Detroit Michigan, which offered to supply the metalwork for a lighthouse that would rest on a caisson foundation sunk into the shoal. The material would be supplied for $33,890, but nobody was interested in signing a contract for the erection of the lighthouse, forcing the Lighthouse Board to oversee the project with hired labor.

After the metalwork arrived from Detroit by railway, the lower courses of the caisson were assembled onshore and then towed to the offshore site on June 24th, 1904. A wooden cofferdam was built in the bottom of the caisson and connected to a central airshaft. This watertight chamber was then pressurized to keep the seawater out and allow men inside to remove the sand and muck below the bottom edge of the caisson. On July 21st, the caisson, which stood in eighteen feet of water, had sunk to the target depth of twenty feet into the shoal. The caisson was then filled with concrete, except for a cylindrical area at its top, which would hold the station’s water cisterns.

The caisson portion was completed in August 1904, but as funding was depleted, the project was put on hold until the following July when an additional $12,000 was made available by Congress. A temporary lens lantern was placed atop the caisson to mark the manmade navigational obstacle during this interval. While work on the five-story superstructure was ongoing, a storm struck the site. On the evening of October 7th, the barometer plunged, the seas rose, and the crew was ordered to vacate their quarters on the temporary wooden wharf for the safer confines of the caisson. Conrad Thompson, who was supervising this phase of the project, described the ordeal. “As the men were in the open caisson sitting up that night a spray would come over every once and a while and wet all hands. There was no sleeping that night and the next day for any of us.” After this sleepless period, the storm quickly abated, and work was resumed after minor repairs were made to the wharf.

Enameled bricks were used to line the inside of the tower and to partition the cylindrical space into wedge-shaped rooms. After expending, $101,353,67, the tower, fully staffed with a keeper and three assistants, first exhibited the light from its third-order Fresnel lens on March 15, 1906.

Given its remoteness, keepers often served several weeks or even months at the Sabine Bank Lighthouse before being relieved, which might explain why it was difficult to secure and retain keepers for the station. The district superintendent in New Orleans complained, “It has been necessary to pick up men who were not on the eligible roster, wherever they can be secured, in order to fulfill frequent vacancies at this isolated station.”

On August 16-17 1915, a hurricane passed near the lighthouse, and the resulting high seas tore away three-quarters of gallery-level veranda, along with hatches, storm shutters, and two of the station’s boats. The monstrous waves swept completely over the structure, allowing seawater to penetrate the tower and contaminate the station's drinking water. The keepers kept the light burning until lack of water forced them form the station on August 19. The light was relit on August 23rd, when the rehydrated keepers returned. After the beating the tower took during the storm, the gallery level was enclosed with three-quarter-inch iron plates dotted with thirteen air ports.

Lens from Sabine Bank Lighthouse

To save the $6,459 annual expense of staffing the Sabine Bank Lighthouse, an acetylene lantern was placed in the Fresnel lens in August of 1922, and the last resident keepers left the station. After being manned for just seventeen years, the lighthouse was fully automated. The tower was temporarily occupied during World War II as a coastal lookout station. In 1960, the light source was converted to a 150-watt lamp, powered by a 32 Volt DC battery. However, with no live-in keepers to care for the tower, it was steadily falling into a state of disrepair. Had the lighthouse been closer to shore, the required maintenance would have been much easier and more affordable.

The Fresnel lens was removed from the lantern room in 1971, and the tower was converted to solar power. You can see the solar panel and light mounted on the gallery level of the lighthouse, in the picture at left, which was taken in February of 2001. Finally, when the condition of the lighthouse threatened the safety of those sent to maintain the light, the decision was made in 2001 to replace the tower with a steel, skeleton structure.

On March 1, 2001, the Coast Guard published a notice soliciting bids for the reconfiguration of the Sabine Bank Lighthouse. The notice stated, "The work consists of demolishing and removing the lighthouse structure above the caisson foundation, replacing the structural main deck at the top of the caisson and installing a new 55-foot tall steel skeleton tower on the main deck. Additionally, the caisson foundation will be rehabilitated with all steel surfaces above the water line to be blasted and painted and installation of new access ladders and main deck handrails. The estimated price range is between $500,000.00 and $1,000,000.00."

Astron General Contracting of Jacksonville, North Carolina was awarded the contract to reconfigure the lighthouse and began the work in late January of 2002. The top section of the lighthouse tower and the lantern room were dismantled and returned to shore, where they were refurbished by R.L. Eldridge and William D. Quick and placed them on display at Lions Park in Sabine Pass, Texas. The original third-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in Paris by the firm of Barbier, Bernard, and Turenne, can be seen at the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur.

References

1. Lighthouses, Lightships, and the Gulf of Mexico, David Cipra, 1997.
2. "The Sparkplug of the Gulf is Gone," Jeremy D'Entremont, Lighthouse Digest, July 2002.
3. Lighthouses of Texas, T. Lindsay Baker, 2001.

Museum of the Gulf Coast, home to the Fresnel lens from the lighthouse, is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. The museum is located at 700 Procter Street in Port Arthur, and can be reached at (409) 982-7000.