Site of the Corpus Christi Lighthouse

It was less a tower than a house. The Corpus Christi light was a keeper's dwelling with a lantern room on the roof and a Fresnel lens 77 feet up, and it began failing within months because the bluff soil could not carry it. The Light House Board voted on September 15, 1859 to discontinue it, judged buttresses too costly, and used pier lights. The light went dark on November 1, 1859. The butter-churn blast the plaque dates to 1863 came, the lighthouse histories say, after the war, from children trying to pull down the ruin.

What the plaque says

Site of the Corpus Christi Lighthouse In the late 1850s, Col. John M. Moore began dredging operations in the bay to create a large harbor for Corpus Christi. The U.S. Lighthouse Service purchased this site from J. Burnside and Co. on March 13, 1857, and soon built a brick lighthouse to serve as a beacon for vessels approaching the new port. The outbreak of the Civil War interrupted plans for harbor construction. During the war Confederate forces used the lighthouse as a powder magazine. In 1863, a Federal invasion threatened, and a group of loyal Confederate youths decided, without authority, to destroy the lighthouse arsenal to prevent its capture. They filled a butter churn with gunpowder and placed it beside the structure. The resulting explosion and fire damaged the tower, but failed to ignite the storehouse of powder inside. The boys first hid in a nearby cemetery, then fled to a salt marsh north of the city. Their identities were, for years, a well-kept secret. After the war, repairs were made to the lighthouse and it returned to use. The old beacon was abandoned in the mid-1870s and soon fell into disrepair. About 1878, city aldermen declared it a dangerous public nuisance and it was dismantled shortly thereafter. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.3 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.9 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.1 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.2 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• John Bernard Murphy — steps away
• Mother Margaret Mary Healy Murphy — steps away
• The Corpus Christi Caller-Times — steps away
• Lone Star Fair — steps away