Maritime Museum Louisiana Maritime History Briefs – Lighthouses West of the Mississippi River Lighthouses- Part B

At the time I wrote Part A of Lighthouses West of the Mississippi River Lighthouses, it was always my intention to prepare a second brief that addressed some of the remaining notable lighthouses west of the Mississippi River lighthouses. As in Part A, the content for this brief is principally drawn from Lighthouses, Lightships, and the Gulf of Mexico by David L. Cipra. Before addressing several lighthouses in detail, a comprehensive listing of all the lighthouses not addressed in the Part A brief follows: Point Defer- Atchafalaya Bay; Southwest Reef; Point Au Fer Reef; Vermillion Bay; Shell Keys; Trinity Shoal; Oyster Bayou; and Sabine Pass.

Most of us are aware of the geographical complexity of coastal Louisiana and that’s particularly true of the area west of the Mississippi River. The area is characterized by barrier islands whose boundaries are constantly changing particularly due to strong storms and hurricanes. Other features of the area include soft unconsolidated sediments, shallow bays, and marshes. Taken together, these features present significant challenges to the siting, construction, and stability of lighthouses. The area also encompasses the outlet of a major river, the Atchafalaya, that served as a major waterway for Charles Morgan’s steamship freight and passenger operation to the west in the late 1850’s. Considering the self-imposed word limitation for the briefs, I’ve chosen to limit my primary discussion to the Point Defer, Southwest Reef, and Point Au Fer Lighthouses, all of which had a relatively common purpose. All of these lighthouses were located at various accesses to Atchafalaya Bay and helped guide vessels to the mouth of the Atchafalaya River and beyond that Bayou Teche.

Atchafalaya Bay is bounded to the southwest by Marsh Island and to the southeast by Point Defer, now referred to as Point Au Fer. An early survey designated Point Defer as bounding the entrance to Bayou Teche whereas the mouth of the bayou was some 14 miles to the north. The survey established that the bayou carried 8 ft of water as far as New Iberia but overhanging trees restricted transport to pirogues. By 1825, enough commerce passed through the bay to warrant consideration of a lighthouse installation. However, locating the lighthouse at the entrance to the bayou could not be justified because the shallow conditions in the bay prevented safe nighttime passages. Thus, the decision was made to locate the lighthouse at Point Defer, requiring vessels to wait until dawn until entering the bay after which they could follow stakes and buoys to the entrance to the bayou.

Because of the remoteness and isolation of the construction site for the Point Defer Lighthouse, no contractors stepped forward despite the fact that the original allocated contract funds of $10,000 were increased by $4,000. It wasn’t until 18 months later that James B. Gill and Hersey Stowell of Boston accepted the contract. Problems of various kinds and worker illnesses delayed the actual start of the construction until September 20, 1827. Once started, work proceeded in a timely manner resulting in completion of the lighthouse by the end of the year. No details about the configuration of the lighthouse were discovered other than the tower stood 5 ft. above high tide and that the 15 lamps were located 70 ft above sea level. At that elevation, the lamps could not be seen from the mouth of Bayou Teche. Neither a diagram nor photo of the lighthouse was found to exist. In 1846, after 18 years of service, the foundation of the tower was failing causing the tower to be three feet out of plumb. Funds had been requested the previous year to either place a lightship at the entrance to the bay or replace the existing tower with a screw pile lighthouse. No such allocation was forthcoming but on December 27, 1848, a lightship was anchored near the end of the shoal that extended approximately 15 miles westward from Point Defer to the main channel of the bay and remained there for the next 11 years or so. After consideration of a number of options, $20,000 was authorized in 1857 to replace the existing lighthouse with a screw pile lighthouse located at the western end of the Southwest Reef and equip it with fourth-order Fresnel lens that had a range of approximately 10 nautical miles. Effective September 1, 1859, the Point Defer Lighthouse was extinguished and replaced by the Southwest Reef Lighthouse (shown in the map of Atchafalaya Bay).

As shown here, the Southwest Reef Lighthouse was a somewhat unique design only duplicated by the Calcasieu River Lighthouse. The location did not require a particularly tall light tower resulting in the lights being located 49-ft. above sea level. On the other hand, a very robust structure was needed to withstand the storms and hurricanes that the lighthouse would surely have to survive.

The principal means employed to reinforce the light tower and residence was to fully enclose them with iron boilerplate. If you read Part A of the brief about lighthouses west of the Mississippi River lighthouses, you might recall this photo of the Southwest Reef Lighthouse light tower that is now on display at the Town of Berwick. As originally installed, the tower was painted red as shown here. However, during its service life, the lighthouse was actually black due to a coating of coal tar to protect the boilerplate from corrosion. In its third year of service, Confederate forces deactivated the lighthouse. It remained dark until the end of the war. After the war, Union forces discovered the lamps, lens and plates of glass in St. Martinville allowing the lighthouse to be restored during the summer of 1865.

Unmentioned in the sources I used to learn about the histories of the lighthouses was the role of Charles Morgan, the subject of four earlier briefs, in dredging an Atchafalaya Bay ship channel in 1872. The channel depicted on the map of the Bay could possibly be the channel dredged by Morgan’s forces. If that’s the case, the mouth of Morgan’s ship channel was situated so that the Southwest Reef Lighthouse would serve to guide mariners to its entrance.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1867 made landfall in the State of Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane on October 2nd damaging the Southwest Reef Lighthouse. Despite being built approximately 10 ft. above the high tide elevation, waves broke through the bottom of the dwelling and tore the gallery from the tower. Further, the force of the waves bent the legs of the lighthouse. In an attempt to prevent future damage from hurricanes, Congress appropriated funds in 1873 to raise the lighthouse ten feet and install a system of diagonal braces between the piles, work that finally took place in 1875. Also damaged in the 1867 storm was the Ship Shoal Light but fared better than the Shell Keys Lighthouse that was destroyed and its keeper drowned. The Shell Keys Lighthouse was located at a vulnerable location on the south point of Marsh Island.

At the same time that Congress allocated funds to repair the Southwest Reef Lighthouse, they allocated $15,000 for a steam-operated fog signal for the station. The building for the signal

was constructed on a system of four screw piles at a location near but south of the lighthouse. To facilitate its operation by the lighthouse keepers, signal building was connected to the lighthouse by a covered passageway. During its last year of operation, the steam-operated fog signal consumed an astounding 26,830 pounds of coal!

The Southwest Reef Lighthouse continued to operate until the Point Au Fer Reef Lighthouse was constructed and activated on March 31, 1916. The reason for the new lighthouse was to mark the westerly side of a channel that was cut through the Point Au Fer Reef and dredged through Atchafalaya Bay to create a direct route to the Atchafalaya River. The lighthouse was located on a dredge spoil bank known as Eugene Island. Composed of shells and mud, the island is 2 to 5 feet above mean high water. A total of $50,000 was allocated for the project, half of which was to be used to purchase and install channel markers and buoys. The tower housing fourth order Fresnel lens was placed on 25 iron-cased creosoted piles at a height of 17-ft. above mean high water elevation. Officially designated as the Point Au Fer Reef and Fog-Signal Station, the function of the station was augmented by Atchafalaya Entrance Channel Lights Nos. 1, 3, 5 7, and 2. In addition, gas-lighted buoys were also used to mark the channel. Along with the light and fog signal station, the island houses a carbide house, boathouse, boat ways and a wharf. After serving for almost 60 years, the station was deactivated in 1975 and replaced by a skeleton tower. The decommissioned lighthouse was offered to a local historical society, but they declined resulting in the structure being burned down by the U. S. Coast Guard.

Being a geotechnical engineer, I was particularly interested in the various foundation systems, some successful and some not, employed for lighthouses. In the case of the latter, three facts should be recognized: geotechnical engineering theory and practice had yet to be developed;

in most instances, the foundation support conditions at most lighthouse sites were poor; and lastly but importantly, the lighthouses faced extreme wind and water forces from hurricanes. Given these factors, lighthouse designers were faced with a daunting task with both limited knowledge and technology. Fortunately, an 1848 paper in the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal by an Irish civil engineer, Alexander Mitchell, described the use of screw piles for foundation support systems, a system that Mitchell had patented in 1833. That accounts for the fact that helical piles had been used for almost 10 years in advance of Mitchell’s paper. Along the east coast of the United States alone, more than 100 screw pile lighthouse foundation systems were employed between the 1850s and 1890s. Screw piles were reported to have been first used for lighthouse construction along the northern Gulf Coast several years before the Civil War.

The diagrams depict one concept of a screw pile installation method and a lighthouse screw pile foundation system.

Two significantly different approaches to lighthouse design are embodied in the Sabine Pass Lighthouse and the Sabine Bank Lighthouse. The Sabine Pass Lighthouse used eight fin-like buttresses around the base of a tower to spread the load of the tower and provide additional lateral support at the base of the tower.

The first open water lighthouse was the Sabine Bank Lighthouse located 16 miles off the Louisiana and Texas coast. Using prefabricated cylindrical sections, the bottom of which included a cutting edge. The caisson was progressively sunk, and cylindrical sections added, as workman performed excavation in the pressurized chamber. Once the desired depth of embedment was achieved, the base of the caisson was sealed with concrete. The light, first lite in March 1906, was 72 ft above sea level. This method is the same as that employed by Roebling in the construction of the tower foundations for the Brooklyn Bridge that opened in May 1883.

In concluding the series of briefs on lighthouses, the service and sometimes heroic efforts of thousands of lighthouse keepers and their families should be acknowledged. Starting in 1716 and extending into the late 1900’s lighthouses were tended by men and women, often with their families in resident. A program, designated LAMP, was initiated by the U. S. Coast Guard in 1968 to automate all lighthouse thus eliminating the need for keepers but it wasn’t until the 1990’s that the objective of that program was finally achieved.