Aransas Pass Light Station Photograph courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

On March 3, 1851, Congress authorized $12,500 for the construction of Aransas Pass Lighthouse. That same year, Lieutenant Commander T.A. Craven of the Coast Survey, while mapping this part of the Texas coast, recommended that a lightship be used to mark the pass, which was known to be slowly creeping south as currents deposited sand on the southern end of Saint Joseph Island and cut away the northern tip of Mustang Island.

Before settling on the type of light to mark Aransas Pass, the Lighthouse Board ordered a second survey of the coast, which occurred in 1853. H.S. Stellwagen visited the area and concluded that a screwpile lighthouse located inside the pass would be most useful on this “coast where there is so much sameness as to make it almost impossible to distinguish one place from another.” Adding another option for the lighthouse, District Inspector Walter H. Stevens in Galveston recommended a prefabricated cast-iron tower like those in use at Bolivar Point and on Matagorda Island. The task of determining which of the lights was most suitable to the area was then turned over to a committee that, perhaps a bit surprisingly, concluded that a brick tower, the most permanent style of lighthouse, should be used. The federal government purchased twenty-five acres on Harbor Island, located just inside the pass, and the state of Texas shortly thereafter ceded jurisdiction over the land on June 20, 1855.

A schooner carrying the bricks for the tower foundered on the sandbar at the entrance to Aransas Pass during high seas in late December of 1855. The crew was rescued, but the ship and its cargo were a total loss. During 1856, new bricks arrived at the island, followed later by the lantern room, and finally a fourth-order Fresnel lens. The keeper’s dwelling and the fifty-five-foot, octagonal tower, with a coat of brown paint, were completed by the early part of 1857. The light from the tower’s lantern room first illuminated the night sky above the pass later that year.

Sometime after the start of the Civil War, the lens was removed from the lantern room for safekeeping. Control of the tower passed repeatedly between Confederate and Union forces. Then, on Christmas Day of 1862, Confederate General John B. Magruder ordered the destruction of the tower. Two kegs of powder were exploded inside the tower, damaging the upper twenty-feet of brickwork and destroying most of the circular staircase.

After the war, Texas' lights were gradually repaired or rebuilt and returned to service. Early in 1867, a work crew arrived to repair the upper portion of the damaged tower at Aransas Pass. Acting District Lighthouse Engineer M.F. Bonzano described a winter storm that hampered the work: “During the progress of the repairs one of the severest Northers ever experienced on the Texas coast occurred. The cold was so severe that frozen fish were hove ashore by the hundreds and birds of all sorts sought refuge in the tower and camp of the workmen where they perished in large numbers.” The Aransas Pass Lighthouse was the last principal light along the coast to return to service, doing so in the spring of 1867.

Fresnel lens used in Aransas Pass Lighthouse Photograph courtesy Peggy Werth

Parry W. Humphreys was appointed keeper of the lighthouse on June 3, 1869. To supplement the provisions supplied by the Lighthouse Service, the family maintained a vegetable garden on Mustang Island. While the two previous keepers had lasted only a year at the station, Keeper Humphreys spent over sixteen years and apparently didn’t leave the station willingly. In 1885, the District Inspector felt that Keeper Humphreys, who was about seventy-eight years old at the time, was unfit to maintain the station. The superintendent visited the station and urged the dismissal of Humphries not only on account of his age but also for “drunkenness, disobedience of orders and refusing to pay his debts.” The Humphreys left the station in March 1886.

Hurricanes periodically swept through the area, inflicting varying degrees of destruction on the station. The most damage was caused by the hurricane of August 18, 1916, which prompted Congress to allocate “$20,000 for repairing buildings and dwellings, out buildings, and appurtenant structures, damaged or destroyed in the hurricane.” The repair work, which had suffered several delays, was almost complete when a hurricane struck on September 13, 1919. The workmen weathered the storm in the new hollow-tile keeper’s dwelling, but the assistant’s dwelling was swept away. A small dwelling for the assistant keeper was subsequently built just behind the tower and adjacent to the keeper’s dwelling. These edifices survive to this day, along with a third dwelling added around 1940.

Electricity reached the station in 1928 when diesel generators were brought to the station to power a newly installed radio beacon. Using a signal from at least two such beacons, ships could determine their precise position along the coast. On April 11 1935, the keeper at Aransas Pass was forced to keep the radiobeacon on for two days as the air was filled with dust, limiting visibility to about a quarter mile. The keeper reported: "The dwelling, tower, and radio room, are covered, inside and out, with a coating of dust that is as fines as chalk."

When the Coast Guard assumed responsibilities for all lighthouses in 1939, a civilian keeper and three Coast Guard assistants staffed the station. Together, they shared the responsibility for the lighthouse and forty minor beacons marking the channels in the area.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Aransas Pass had slowly inched over one mile south of the lighthouse. To better mark the entrance, a new light was established in 1952 at the Port Aransas Coast Guard Station, and Aransas Pass Lighthouse was deactivated, just a few years shy of a century of service. The Lydia Ann Channel, which runs north from the pass, was now the closest waterway to the tower, and the lighthouse started to be referred to as the Lydia Ann Light.

The origin of the name Lydia Ann is a bit uncertain. A historical marker near the tower indicates that the channel was “named for the daughter of the first keeper.” Keeper Frank Stephenson had a daughter named Lydia Ann, who married her father's assistant, Thomas P. Roberts, and some claim the channel was named for her. Local historians believe that Lydia Ann Channel was named for Lydia Ann Dana Hastings Hull Wells, wife of James B. Wells, a veteran of the Texas Revolution who settled on St. Joseph Island with his family and raised cattle for several decades until his death in 1880.

In 1955, after no government entities expressed interest in the abandoned Aransas Pass Lighthouse, it was sold into private hands. Everett Bohls, of Austin, Texas, submitted the winning bid of $25,151, while the mineral and oil rights were sold separately to Jack Rowe. Charles Butt, president of the H-E-B grocery store chain, purchased the property in 1973 from Jack Frost. During the next decade, Butt oversaw the restoration of the tower and outbuildings, and hired author Francis Ross Holland, Jr. to write the history of the lighthouse. In 1984, Butt employed Rick and Cameron Pratt as live-in caretakers (prior caretakers included Steve and Sandy Durhan, Ted Norman, and Jimmy Gates). After the light returned to service on July 3, 1988 as a private aid to navigation, these modern lightkeepers would ascend the tower’s sixty steps each evening to activate the light, and then Rick would fill the evening air with the drone of bagpipes as Cameron lowered the station’s flags – a fitting ceremony for a lighthouse acquainted with years of regimented life under the Lighthouse Service. Since the Pratts, other modern keepers have been employed to watch over the beacon.

Head Keepers: Elmanson Lewis (1856 – 1859), William R. Roberts (1859 – 1861), Sylvanus Dunham (1867 – 1868), Jerome Tuttle (1868 – 1869), Parry W. Humphreys (1869 – 1886), W.L. Penn (1886 – 1888), William Egly (1888 – 1895), Anton Anderson (1895 – 1897), Frank Stephenson (1897 – 1918), Thomas P. Roberts (1918 - at least 1920), C.W. Anderson (at least 1929), William G. Browder (at least 1940), W.A. Jones (1944 – 1952).

Photo Gallery: 1 2 3 4 5 6

References

1. Annual Report of the Lighthouse Board, various years.
2. Lighthouse Service Bulletin, various years.
3. Lighthouses of Texas, T. Lindsay Baker, 2001.
4. “Aransas Pass Lighthouse,” Wayne Wheeler, The Keeper’s Log, Winter 2005.
5. Lighthouses, Lightships, and the Gulf of Mexico, David Cipra, 1997.
6. Lighthouse Life, Scripps Howard News Service, 2001.