
Aransas Pass Progress
Friday, March 10, dignitaries gathered at Conn Brown Harbor in Aransas Pass to celebrate one of the most symbolic pieces of the restoration that’s taken five years for the City of Aransas Pass to close a chapter on following the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The crucifix above the Seaman’s Memorial Tower has been replaced, the original blown away by the fury of the storm. DMR Services of Ingleside, usually busy with fabricating jobs for recreational boating, recreated the metal cross out of aluminum tubing with rounded edges to make it more durable should another hurricane hit the area.

On two sides of the tower pink marble slabs are engraved with the names of fishermen who perished, the sea a dangerous and unforgiving landscape for many whose livelihoods depended on shrimping, and still do. Charlie Marshall, a respected local funeral director, donated the stone tablets.
Aransas Pass Progress

Aransas Pass Progress
A lithograph print shows what the original memorial looked like when it was built in May 1970.

On the grounds of the memorial is this anchor, a marker nearby indicating it had been donated by a fisherman who pulled it up from the ocean floor, its origins likely more than 100 years old, believed to have come from a Civil War-era gunship that once plied the waters.
Aransas Pass Progress