Sinking Site of the Blockade Runner "Acadia"

Most blockade runners were small and plain. The Acadia was a 738-ton side-wheel steamer, built at Sorel, Quebec, in 1864 and bigger than most of her kind. She sailed from Halifax with Confederate passengers bound for Veracruz, and a U.S. consul suspected they meant to seize a mail steamer on the Pacific. Her loss is blamed on bad navigation: the compasses were reportedly never properly adjusted, with iron left near them. The hull lay in the surf for years as a fishing reef, and in the late 1960s Wendell Pierce and Rice University's Frank Hole examined it.

What the plaque says

Sinking Site of the Blockade Runner "Acadia" The sidewheel steamer "Acadia", owned by Canadians, set out on her maiden voyage in Dec. 1864 for Nassau, Havana, and vera Cruz. Loaded with food, hardware, and clothing, she braved the Federal blockade to bring the goods to suffering Texans. Early on feb. 6, 1865, in heavy fog she grounded in sticky clay 300 yards off this beach. Her crew and cargo came safely ashore. When the fog lifted, the foe sighted and shelled her, but could not board and burn the crippled ship, as Confederate Cavalry defended her from the shore. The "Acadia" then became a coastal landmark.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 7.5 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Galveston Island State Park — 26 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.

More markers nearby

• Gulf Intracoastal Waterway — steps away
• Velasco — steps away
• Old Velasco, C. S. A. — steps away
• The Lively — 1.0 mi