April 3, 2018

A Witness-to-History Lighthouse

By roads-rus

Author and deep-thinker Virginia Woolf said, “Lighthouses are endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other.”  Perhaps connectedness is the reason why I’ve climbed to the tops of so many of them, but Ruth and I recently saw one that is not isolated.  In fact, it’s right in the center of a town of more than 5,000 people, Port Isabel, and overlooks the busy Queen Isabella Causeway.  When established, Port Isabel was El Fronton de Santa Isabella and known as  a natural deep water harbor with fine docking facilities.  The Port Isabel lighthouse, now a state historic site, is the only lighthouse on the Texas Coast opened to the public.

The lighthouse keeper’s cottage is used for exhibits that explain this beacon’s past importance.  The lighthouse itself was built in 1852 to guide ships between Padre and Brazos Islands and into the Rio Grande, which was then a major waterway with lots of boat traffic.   Today it’s called a river to nowhere.  A memorial plaque at the site accurately calls this lighthouse, “The beacon for the commerce of the Rio Grande” and notes that its light was extinguished during the Civil War.   The whole facility was permanently discontinued 40 years after this war ended.  It is 73 feet tall, contains 75 steps, and, when operating, could be seen 16 miles out on the Gulf of Mexico.  It was one of 8 lights on the Texas coast.

The Port Isabel lighthouse survived 2 wars, hurricanes, and abandonment.  During the Mexican-American War Port Isabel was a treatment center for the wounded and a supply depot.  Early in the Civil War, Port Isabel was controlled by Confederate forces who used  the lighthouse to spy on Union soldiers.  The Confederates tried to blow it up when they had to evacuate.  All the ships in the harbor were destroyed or captured when The Union attacked in 1963 ending the era of blockade running and the use of Port Isabel as a major Confederate exporter of cotton to foreign markets and as a source for cotton to make Confederate uniforms when Brownsville, Texas,  was known as “the Backdoor to the South”.

The Port Isabel Lighthouse is structurally quite traditional, and the view from the top is of the town below, not a wild and wonderful ocean vista.  It is, nevertheless, a 4 Compass attraction worth doing if you’re in the area.

Hank

 

 

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018 at 8:38 pm and posted in The Gulf Coast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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