Bolivar Lighthouse Galveston Bay
— the iron tower that held against the 1900 storm.
Not only on a wall.
Bolivar Lighthouse Galveston Bay, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Bolivar Lighthouse stands on the inland side of the peninsula, across the channel from Galveston. The cast-iron tower, built in 1872, ran a light at the entrance to Galveston Bay for sixty years before it was decommissioned. During the 1900 hurricane it sheltered more than a hundred people on its iron stairs. It is privately owned now and not open to the public.
The place, in three passes.
The Bolivar Point Light, commonly called the Bolivar Lighthouse, stands near Port Bolivar on the Bolivar Peninsula in Galveston County, Texas. It guards the north side of the entrance to Galveston Bay, across the channel from Galveston Island. The current tower, completed in 1872, replaced an earlier 1852 lighthouse that Confederate forces dismantled during the Civil War. The lighthouse is reached today by a short drive from the Galveston-Port Bolivar ferry terminal.
The tower is cast iron, lined with brick, and stands 116 feet tall, painted black to resist the salt air. The cast-iron sections were prefabricated and bolted on site, a common nineteenth-century construction for coastal towers in hurricane country. The light was first illuminated in 1872 and decommissioned in 1933, when the channel was rerouted and a smaller automated light replaced it. The structure has been in private ownership since 1947.
On September 8, 1900, the Galveston hurricane killed an estimated 8,000 people, the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The Bolivar Lighthouse keeper, Harry C. Claiborne, sheltered more than 125 people on the iron stairs inside the tower as the storm surge crossed the peninsula. The lighthouse held. It held again in 1915 during a second major hurricane, and the structure remains standing after Hurricane Ike, which crossed the peninsula in 2008.
