Middle Bay Lighthouse Display Gets Finishing Touch

It may be on dry land, in the middle of an airport lobby, but this lantern room is built identically to what used to stand atop the Middle Bay Lighthouse. It's hoped this captures the lighthouse mystique

“It's amazing how many people will go to different places that have lighthouses just to look at them,” says Alabama Lighthouse Association Project Manager Jim Horner. This display started about eight years ago. A new lantern room was discovered and refurbished at a cost of $7000.

“We were able to refinish it, paint it, have it sand blasted and put the display together,” says Horner. At its center is this recently acquired Fresnel lens. The rare, multi-prism glass case is on loan from the coast guard.

“A gentleman by the name of Fresnel created a set of prisms,” says Brent Beall, the exhibits and facilities director at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico. “So that light was able to be seen 25 miles out into sea. Informational kiosks flank the display. This is one 11th the size of an actual screwpile lighthouse. The called it that because of the poles. They actually had to be screwed in by hand to stay up in the water.

“It was built finished, and then sank seven feet one evening,” says Beall. “So our middle bay light actually sits in the water about seven feet lower than it was designed.” The Middle Bay Lighthouse is one of only two functioning screwpiles in existence. The original was built in the mid 19th century and was refurbished four years ago.