The Mobile Bay Middle Lighthouse, located in Mobile Bay, Alabama, began operations on December 1, 1885. Given its location in roughly the center of the bay, the lighthouse is known as both Middle Bay Lighthouse and Mobile Bay Lighthouse. The light from a fourth-order Fresnel lens cast its beams from a top the lighthouse at a focal plane of forty-one feet. The light's characteristic was fixed white varied every thirty seconds by a red flash. The station also has a fog bell that was struck a blow every five seconds when conditions merited it. Due to high labor costs in the post-Civil War South, the lighthouse was prefabricated in the North and then shipped to Mobile Point, where it arrived in 1885. The facility was built on an iron undergirding, and both the tower and the hexagonal keeper's house it supported were patterned after lighthouses operating in Chesapeake Bay. The screwpile lighthouse consisted of a wooden hexagonal dwelling with a pyramidal roof that slopped upwards to the centrally located lantern room. The lighthouse was supported by seven legs-one in the middle, and a single leg extending from each corner of the superstructure. After the piles had been screwed into the bottom of the bay, the structure suddenly settled seven-and-a half feet on September 12, 1885. Wooden piles were hurriedly driven around the screwpiles and succeeded in stabilizing the lighthouse. The settling was so even on each screwpile, that the lighthouse was only three or four inches from being perfectly level. The foundation piles were painted red, the dwelling white with green blinds, and the lantern room black. The lighthouse was automated in 1935 and deactivated in 1967. The lighthouse was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 30, 1974. By 2002, the lighthouse had deteriorated quite badly, and a major restoration effort was initiated at a cost of almost $350,000. As part of this project, the lighthouse received a new slate roof, and damaged wood and corroded tie rods were replaced. The roughly fifteen-foot-tall pyramidal structure that displayed a red flashing light atop the lighthouse was replaced by a six-foot pole supporting a solar-powered red light. In 2003, a real-time weather station was added to the lighthouse by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program. Still running, the weather station samples precipitation, total and quantum solar radiation, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, water temperature, salinity, water depth, and dissolved oxygen.
In 1916, the keeper's wife gave birth to a baby that summer at the station. According to the Alabama Lighthouse Association web site, the keeper brought a dairy cow to the station and corralled it on a section of the lower deck because his wife was unable to nurse the newborn baby. All had to be evacuated when the station survived but was damaged by a hurricane that year.
Design - Active hexagonal-shaped cottage style screw-pile lighthouse.
Located near the middle of Mobile Bay, 14.3 miles north of Mobile Point.
GPS: Latitude: 30.4374, Longitude: -88.01145
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