The Port Aransas Museum holds nearly 40,000 historical photographs. It has film footage from the 1920s and 1930s. It has oral history recordings with islanders who survived Hurricane Celia. It has a Fourth Order Fresnel lens manufactured in 1860s Paris. It has a 60-foot genealogy scroll tracing 20 local families from a single 1854 marriage. And the building itself — a 1910 Sears, Roebuck catalog kit house, shipped to the island on a barge, that once served as the Coast Guard station — is an artifact in its own right. Almost none of this is accessible online. The museum's digital presence consists of a basic WordPress site with no searchable archive, no published oral histories, no virtual exhibits. It is one of the most significant gaps in Texas coastal heritage — and one of the greatest opportunities.
A Sears Kit House on a Barge
The museum building was ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalog — a prefabricated home with all components shipped pre-cut and numbered for assembly. It was built by Robert A. Mercer, son of Robert Ainsworth Mercer, the man who established the first permanent settlement on Mustang Island in 1855. The kit house was brought to Port Aransas on a barge in 1910.
It survived the devastating 1919 hurricane. When that storm destroyed the original Life Saving Station, this kit house served as the temporary Coast Guard station until a new facility opened in 1925. After that, it passed into private ownership. Municipal Court Judge Duncan Neblett and former Mayor Georgia Neblett lived there for twenty years. It became known as the Neblett house.
In 2006, an out-of-town developer purchased the property with plans to demolish the house and build townhouses. In 2007, it was listed on Preservation Texas's Most Endangered Places. PAPHA acquired the house — the original owners donated it to be moved — and spent $45,311 to relocate it to the Community Center property. It opened as the Port Aransas Museum in December 2008.
38,000 Photos and Counting
The museum's photo archive has grown from an initial collection of 8,000 digitized images to nearly 40,000. The person responsible for this is Mark Creighton, a Cornell graduate who arrived in Port Aransas from the New Jersey shore in 1982. Creighton is a founding and lifetime member of PAPHA, the museum archivist, and the primary force behind digitizing the historical photo collection.
Every historical photograph added to the archive passes through Creighton's hands. The subjects span the late 1800s through the present: fishing, storms, daily life, buildings, schools, the jetties, boats, the lighthouse, families. The Brundrett family holdings alone include photographs from the late 1800s.
The collection grows through ongoing donations. In one remarkable discovery, Port Aransas resident Cathy Fulton found 12 photographs dated 1929 to 1931 in a drawer of an abandoned trailer near Beach Access Road 1. The envelope was labeled "Port Aransas school children." Creighton noted the children may have been from "rag town" — a tent community from the late 1920s and 1930s.
“Nearly 40,000 historical photographs. Film footage from the 1920s. Oral histories with hurricane survivors. Almost none of it is accessible online.”
The Fresnel Lens and the Clockmaker's Heir
The museum's centerpiece is a Fourth Order Fresnel lens that served in the Lydia Ann Lighthouse from 1878 to 1952. It was manufactured in the 1860s by Augustin Henry Lapaute, whose family were clockmakers for French royalty. Lapaute met physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel and applied his clockwork knowledge to create a revolutionary lens rotation system.
The lens stands two feet, four inches tall. It was decommissioned in 1954 and given to the City of Port Aransas, which transferred it to the museum after opening. In November 2022, a visitor named Jean-Pierre Jacks — Lapaute's great-great-great-grandson — arrived from France and identified a previously overlooked maker's engraving on the metal base. Five generations and 160 years, connected by a lens in a small museum on a barrier island.
The Collections
Beyond the photographs and the Fresnel lens, the museum holds a bronze jetty train bell from the Aransas Harbor Terminal Railway — the railroad chartered in 1892 to haul granite blocks to the jetty construction site. The bell has lost its clapper but visitors are encouraged to interact with it.
There is a genealogy scroll approximately sixty feet long, tracing about twenty local families stemming from a single 1854 marriage between Franz Joseph Frandolig and Hannah Anna Ellen Schwander. The Moores, the Mathews, the Bujans — all connected.
The Tarpon Era exhibit, opened in February 2020, holds fishing rods and reels, Rodeo trophies, a linen line-drying spool, tarpon fish prints by Dinah Bowman (whose gyotaku work is in the Smithsonian permanent collection), and a mounted tarpon from the first Deep Sea Roundup in 1932 — believed caught by Totsy Millican, though entered under her husband North's name.
And there are the oral histories: video interviews with long-time islanders, an ongoing project capturing personal narratives about hurricanes, fishing, and local characters. The 2025 "Historic Families and Characters" exhibit features direct input from families including the Brundrett, Milligan, Farley, Belcher, Teller, Baker, and Parker families — and, for the first time, Port Aransas's Black residents.
The Digital Gap
PAPHA's website is a basic WordPress site with pages for exhibits, events, and membership. There is no searchable photo database. No oral histories are published digitally — no podcast, no YouTube channel, no audio archive. The 1920s film footage is not available online in any form. The McKee Collection of 400-plus antique fishing rods and reels has a single webpage with no catalog and no images.
This matters because the collection is genuinely extraordinary. If the archive were digitized and made accessible, it would be one of the most comprehensive coastal heritage collections available online in Texas. The oral histories alone — recordings from survivors of Celia, from families who have been on the island for a century — represent irreplaceable primary sources.
The gap is not a criticism. PAPHA is a small nonprofit with $464,000 in annual revenue and a handful of staff. Digitization at this scale requires resources they don't yet have. But the opportunity is clear: a world-class physical archive with essentially zero digital reach.
PAPHA — The Organization Behind It All
The Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association was founded in November 2002. Two of its key founders were Dr. John Guthrie Ford — a Trinity University psychology professor who transcribed the Mercer Logs, wrote the South Jetty's "History Corner" column, and created multiple museum exhibits before his death in 2018 — and Mark Creighton, who became the museum archivist.
PAPHA manages the museum, Farley Boat Works, the Chapel on the Dunes tours, the Mercer Market gift shop, and The Preserve (the 6,000-square-foot maritime museum under construction). Its total assets are just over $2 million. It operates on about $410,000 in annual expenses. Rick Pratt served as founding museum director from 2009 to 2018; Cliff Strain, a 40-year Port Aransas resident and former Flour Bluff ISD teacher, is the second and current director.