The Mercer Logs

The First Settler's Son

Robert Ainsworth Mercer was the son of the original 1855 settler of Mustang Island. His father had claimed land on the barrier island before the Civil War, when Aransas Pass was the primary commercial channel connecting the Texas interior to Gulf shipping routes. The Mercers were not wealthy planters or speculators. They were working people who lived by the water and understood that the channel was the island's reason for existing.

It was Robert A. Mercer who later built the Sears kit house that would become the Port Aransas Museum — ordered from the catalog in 1910 and shipped to the island on a barge. But the logs predate that house by half a century.

What the Logs Contain

The six ledger books read like the operating system of a barrier island. Robert Mercer recorded the coming and going of every ship through Aransas Pass — names, tonnage, cargo, destinations. He documented the weather obsessively, noting wind direction, temperature, and sea conditions. He recorded shipwrecks and rescues. He noted births, deaths, marriages, and funerals.

The logs also contain something rarer: the texture of daily life on a remote island in the 1860s and 1870s. Family feuds. Parties. The education of children. Place names that no longer exist. Boat names that appear nowhere else in the historical record. The Mercer Logs are not just shipping records — they are the closest thing that exists to a real-time diary of post-Civil War life on the Texas barrier islands.

“He wrote in the third person, in ship's log format, always concerned with the weather.”

After the Blockade

The timing of the first entry is significant. Federal troops had blockaded Aransas Pass from 1862 to 1866, cutting off the commercial shipping that was the island's economic lifeline. They set fire to buildings and appropriated cattle. The Mercer family — like most island residents — abandoned their homes and relocated inland for the duration of the war.

When Robert began writing on March 1, 1866, he was documenting a community rebuilding from nothing. The first entries record which ships returned, which families came back, and what condition the island was in. The logs are, in their earliest pages, a record of recolonization — the same families returning to the same barrier island and starting over.

Three Generations of Record-Keepers

Robert Mercer kept the logs through his death in 1875. His sons John and Edward continued the practice, maintaining the same ship's log format their father had established. There is evidence that wives occasionally contributed entries as well, though the primary record-keepers were the Mercer men.

The handwriting changes. The concerns shift — later entries reflect a more settled community, less focused on survival and more on commerce and civic life. But the format holds. The weather always comes first. The ships always get named. The dead always get recorded.

Preservation and Transcription

Five of the six logs were microfilmed by La Retama Library in Corpus Christi in 1976 — a fortunate act of preservation for documents that had survived over a century of Gulf Coast hurricanes. A sixth log was discovered that same year by a Mercer descendant in Rockport. It awaits transcription.

The most significant transcription work was done by Dr. John Guthrie Ford, a founding member of PAPHA and retired Trinity University psychology professor. Ford transcribed the first five logs into searchable Microsoft Word documents, transforming handwritten 19th-century cursive into text that historians and researchers could actually work with. PAPHA published selections in hardback, available at the museum gift shop.

Ford died in 2018. PAPHA now awards the Dr. John Guthrie Ford History Award for historical scholarship — a fitting legacy for a man who spent years translating another man's handwriting into something the future could read.

“Dr. Ford spent years translating 19th-century handwriting into something the future could read. PAPHA now awards a history prize in his name.”