The Port Aransas Museum sits inside a house that was ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1910 and shipped to the island on a barge. Inside that house: a Third Order Fresnel lens made in 1860s Paris, nearly 40,000 historical photographs, 1920s silent film footage of island life, oral histories recorded on cassette tape, a 60-foot genealogy scroll tracing twenty local families to a single 1854 marriage, whale bones, a jetty train bell, and the mounted tarpon from the first Deep Sea Roundup in 1932. Most of this collection has never been digitized. Almost none of it is accessible online. This is what the island's institutional memory looks like — and why it matters that someone is keeping it.
The House Itself
Key Facts
- Built
- 1910 (Sears kit house)
- Original builder
- Robert A. Mercer
- Museum opened
- December 2008
- Address
- 408 N. Alister Street
- Admission
- Free
The building was built from a Sears, Roebuck and Company mail-order kit by Robert A. Mercer, son of Robert Ainsworth Mercer — the original 1855 settler of Mustang Island. It arrived on a barge and was assembled on the island in 1910. The Craftsman-style house later became known as the Neblett house, after Municipal Court Judge Duncan Neblett and former Mayor Georgia Neblett, who lived there for twenty years.
The house survived the 1919 hurricane and served as a temporary Coast Guard station after the existing station was destroyed. It survived Hurricane Celia in 1970. In 2006, an out-of-town developer bought the property with plans to demolish it and build townhouses. The house was listed on Preservation Texas's Most Endangered Places list in 2007. PAPHA acquired it, spent over $45,000 to relocate it to the Community Center property, and opened the museum in December 2008. Preservation Texas updated its status to a single word: Saved.
The Fresnel Lens
The centerpiece of the museum's collection is a Fourth Order Fresnel lens, originally installed in the Lydia Ann Lighthouse from 1878 to 1952. It was made in the 1860s by Augustin Henry Lapaute, a French lens maker whose ancestors had been clockmakers for Louis XVI and Louis XVII. The lens stands two feet four inches tall, a precisely engineered arrangement of glass prisms designed to bend lamplight into a beam visible for miles at sea.
The Coast Guard decommissioned the lens in 1954 and the city eventually turned it over to the museum after its 2008 opening. In November 2022, Jean-Pierre Jacks — Lapaute's great-great-great-grandson — visited Port Aransas and identified a previously overlooked maker's engraving on the metal base. A lens made in Paris more than 160 years ago, identified by the craftsman's own descendant, displayed in a Sears kit house on a barrier island in Texas.
“In November 2022, the lens maker's great-great-great-grandson visited Port Aransas and identified his ancestor's engraving on the metal base.”
38,000 Photos and Counting
Key Facts
- Photos
- ~40,000
- Primary archivist
- Mark Creighton
- Time span
- Late 1800s to present
- Online access
- Almost none
The museum's photo archive has grown from an initial collection of around 8,000 images to nearly 40,000 photographs and documents spanning the late 1800s through the present. The subjects cover everything: fishing, storms, daily life, buildings, people, school children, the jetties, boats, the lighthouse, community events, families, the ferry, surfing history.
The archive exists because of one person: Mark Creighton. A Cornell graduate who arrived in Port Aransas from the New Jersey shore in 1982, Creighton has been the primary archivist processing every historical photo added to the digital collection. He co-authored Images of America: Port Aransas with founding PAPHA member Dr. John Guthrie Ford. The vast majority of the photos in that book come from his archive.
In one notable discovery, a Port Aransas resident named Cathy Fulton found twelve photographs dated 1929-1931 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. Twelve photos, hidden for nearly a century, found by chance and brought to the one person on the island who would know what they meant.
Film, Tape, and Oral History
Beyond photographs, the museum holds rare 1920s and 1930s film footage of Port Aransas — silent film showing island life a century ago. The footage is available for viewing at the museum and copies can be purchased, but none of it appears to be accessible online in any form.
The museum's ongoing Oral Histories Project records video interviews with important islanders — accounts of hurricanes, fishing, local characters, and daily life that exist nowhere else. These recordings sit on cassette tapes and digital video files inside the museum. No podcast. No YouTube channel. No audio archive.
The Genealogy Scroll
One of the museum's most extraordinary objects is a paper scroll approximately sixty feet long, tracing about twenty local families stemming from one 1854 marriage between Franz Joseph Frandolig and Hannah Anna Ellen Schwander. The families include the Moores, the Mathews, the Bujans, and roughly seventeen others. It's a single document that maps the genetic history of an entire island community back to a single union before the Civil War.
The scroll is not digitized. It is not viewable online. It exists as a physical artifact inside a two-room museum in a house that was shipped to the island on a barge.
The Exhibits
The museum's permanent collection includes a 1940s Farley boat damaged by Hurricane Celia, gyotaku fish prints by Dinah Bowman (whose work is in the Smithsonian's permanent collection), whale bones, and the bronze bell from the Aransas Harbor Terminal Railway — the jetty train that hauled granite blocks 3.5 miles from Central Texas to the jetty construction site from 1892 until the railway closed in 1947.
Rotating exhibits bring the collection to life. The Tarpon Era exhibit, opened in 2020, chronicles the 1880s through the late 1950s with rods, reels, trophies, and the mounted tarpon from the first Deep Sea Roundup — believed caught by Totsy Millican but entered under her husband North's name. The 2025 exhibit, Historic Families and Characters, includes Port Aransas's Black residents for the first time.
“The 2025 exhibit includes Port Aransas's Black residents for the first time.”
The Digital Gap
The museum's physical collection is extraordinary. Its digital presence is not. Almost none of the 40,000 photos are accessible online. No oral histories are published digitally. The 1920s film footage isn't available in any online form. There's no searchable collection database, no virtual exhibits, no digital storytelling.
This isn't a criticism — it's a reality of a small nonprofit running on $464,000 a year with a staff of three. PAPHA has grown from a small preservation society founded in 2002 to an organization managing multiple properties with over two million dollars in assets. The digital frontier is the obvious next step. Until then, the only way to see what the island has saved is to walk through the door.