Shoal Point and Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse

Three brothers from Duluth, Minnesota, Jacob, Henry and Benjamin Myers, went duck hunting at Shoal Point in 1891 and saw a port. They and other Duluth shippers bought 10,000 acres of bay frontage, renamed it Texas City, and filed the first plat in May 1893. A dredged eight-foot channel carried the first shipment in 1894, and a four-mile rail line met the main lines at the junction. The Texas City Improvement Company went into receivership in December 1897. A deeper channel, begun in 1900, was not finished until 1905.

What the plaque says

Shoal Point and Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse A number of families settled along Galveston Bay in the 1830s after land grants were awarded to veterans of the republic of Texas army and navy. An early community at this site became known officially as Shoal Point in 1878 when a U. S. Post Office was established. It was renamed Texas City in 1893. The commencement of shipping in Galveston Bay led to increased settlement in the area. In 1854 the U. S. Government erected a lighthouse in the bay two miles east of Shoal Point at Half Moon Shoal. One of several lighthouses built along the Texas Gulf Coast that year, the Half Moon Shoal lighthouse wa sa red and white painted frame structure with galleries surrounding the main portion of the building and a captain's walk around the light. A bell served as a fog warning device. Decommissioned during the Civil War, the lighthouse was returned to service in 1868 and provided hazard warnings until the disastrous 1900 storm, when a steamship broke free from its mooring and drifted into the structure, destroying it and killing keeper Charles K. Bowen. A beacon replaced the lighthouse until the shipping lanes in the bay were chanted after the construction of the Texas City channel and dike. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 8.6 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 8.7 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Moody Mansion — 9.0 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 9.1 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• William Jefferson Jones — steps away
• U. S. Army Camp at Texas City — steps away
• Wedell's Corner — steps away
• First Aero Squadron — 0.4 mi