Middle Bay Lighthouse

The lighthouse stands alone in the center of Mobile Bay, a screw-pile tower driven into the bay floor in 1885. It's still there — a working aid to navigation in an estuary that discharges 62,000 cubic feet of water per second, where the shipping channel drops to 75 feet but the average depth is 10.

Mobile Bay has mattered since the French founded their colony's capital at Mobile in 1702 and built a deep-sea port at Dauphin Island to handle cargo that couldn't make it through the shallows farther north. The bay sealed off one of the last major Confederate ports in 1864 when Admiral David Farragut's flotilla forced its way past Southern defenses. Middle Bay Lighthouse was placed in the middle of all that traffic twenty-one years later, guiding ships through waters that still hold Civil War wrecks — *CSS Gaines*, *USS Tecumseh*, *CSS Tuscaloosa* among them.

The lighthouse marks the line between the Gulf and the estuary, visible from the Dauphin Island–Fort Morgan ferry that crosses the bay's mouth. It's on the National Register. It's still lit. You can see it doing what it was built to do.