Long before the area became known for fishing boats and gateway views of South Padre Island, Point Isabel played a dramatic role in one of America’s most turbulent chapters — and this remarkable 1864 illustration brings that forgotten moment back to life. 📰✨
Published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper out of New York on February 13, 1864, this striking engraving was sketched on location by the publication’s own special field artist, C.E.H. Bonwill. In the foreground, soldiers are actively digging field trenches — a vivid reminder that Point Isabel sat in contested territory during the Civil War, serving as a critical Union supply and landing point along the Texas Gulf Coast.
Behind the trench line, horse-drawn wagons and supply carts move along the shoreline while steamboats sit docked at the waterfront wharves to the left. On the far right, a lighthouse stands sentinel — almost certainly the Point Isabel Lighthouse, built in 1852 and still standing today as one of the oldest surviving structures on the Texas coast. 🏠
At 8 cents a copy, Frank Leslie’s brought the distant war into Northern living rooms through exactly this kind of vivid, on-the-ground illustration. The town wouldn’t even be renamed Port Isabel until 1928 — meaning generations of Texans grew up knowing this place by the same name you see printed right here.
How many of you have visited Port Isabel and had no idea this history was literally beneath your feet? 👇
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