21st Century Digital #7
Middle Bay or Mobile Bay Lighthouse, Mobile Bay, Alabama. 2010.1
Due to high labor costs in the post-Civil-War South, the lighthouse was prefabricated in the North and then shipped to Mobile Point, where it arrived in 1885. The screwpile lighthouse consists of a wooden hexagonal dwelling with a roof that sloped upwards to a centrally located lantern room. The lighthouse is supported by seven legs-one in the middle, and a single leg extending from each corner of the superstructure.2
The light was automated in 1935 and deactivated in 1967. In 2003, a real-time weather station was added to the lighthouse by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program. Still running, the weather station, one of seven in Mobile Bay, samples precipitation, total and quantum solar radiation, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, water temperature, salinity, water depth, and dissolved oxygen. These data can be seen in real-time at www.mymobilebay.com.3
End Notes:
- Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Image retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010637365/. (Accessed October 16, 2016.); Medium: 1 photograph : digital, TIFF file, color; Credit line: The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
- Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010637365/
- Middle Bay Light – Wikipedia
