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Get real in Port Lavaca

Experience an authentic Texas coastal town

By Angela Fox

There’s a lot to be said for being at the center of things – especially when it comes to a town’s location. Hugging the western shore of broad Lavaca Bay in Calhoun County, Port Lavaca is smack dab in the middle of the 367-mile long Texas Gulf Coast. Maybe that’s why it’s been luring visitors to its shores for nearly 500 years. The Spanish explorer Alonzo Alvarez de Peneda cruised Lavaca Bay in 1519, while French adventurer LaSalle came through in 1685. Folks of all nationalities – from German and Swedish to Mexican and Vietnamese – have been dropping by this thriving waterfront town ever since.

My husband (English-Italian by way of New Orleans) and I (German-English by way of Tennessee) first stopped off in Port Lavaca two years ago and now visit on a regular basis. It helps that we have a vacation home in Palacios, just 28 miles to the east, but we’ve found that Port Lavaca has enough charm to merit driving many times that far. “It’s an authentic coastal town,” says Dean Johnstone, owner of the Roseate Spoonbill Gallery. “There are an awful lot of people who were born and raised here and they share a common experience of growing up on the water. Since the 1840s, Port Lavaca’s economy has been centered on the bay.”

Dean’s gallery on historic Main Street, just a few blocks from the bay, is the perfect place to see what that means. Actually, the gallery is two art spaces connected by a breezeway filled with tropical plants and garden art. In one building, you can enjoy works by area artists including Dean; in the other, you can step back in time to early 20th century Port Lavaca via a collection of vintage photographs that have been restored and reproduced by Dean. The collection, reproductions of which are also for sale, amounts to a priceless archive of Port Lavaca’s past. Views of the town’s harbor and historic buildings abound, as do ones of surrounding communities. “The beauty of Port Lavaca is that you can look at a photo from 1910 in the gallery and then drive over and see the same spot today,” says Dean, who honed his skills as a photographer and digital artist in his former life as a petroleum geologist with companies from Houston to Corpus Christi.

One spot that’s the same today as it was in the early 1900s is Melcher’s Hardware, also on Main Street. The store is, in its own way, as much a repository of town history as the gallery’s vintage photo collection. For one thing, it’s the oldest continuously operating business in town (since 1917) and for another, it’s still run by the Melcher family. We first got to know J. C. Melcher, grandson of the founder, when we came looking for a faucet to fit a 1928 kitchen sink that we were installing in our 1905 house in Palacios. He had just what we needed and he’s proven to be a wealth of home restoration information and equipment ever since.

The store is stocked to the rafters with every conceivable hardware and household item, plus a few antiques and family memorabilia.  It’s the kind of place where you learn something new each time you visit. Who knew, for example, that anyone still made – let alone sold – chamber pots? “They are also known as thunder mugs,” says J. C., showing us a shiny new blue enameled metal container with a fitted plastic lid and handle.  “A lot of people today think these are bean pots, but we still sell to people, especially the elderly, who use them.”

You may not find a thunder mug at the Calhoun County Museum but you will see other objects like an impossibly heavy wool dress worn by a German settler in the 1840s, a piano that survived the great hurricane of 1886 that destroyed the port of Indianola (just south of Port Lavaca) and a camel saddle from the ill-fated attempt to introduce the desert animals to Texas in the late 1800s. The museum is also one of seven Texas coastal museums hosting LaSalle Odyssey exhibits so you can see items recovered in 1996 from the French explorer’s ship La Belle that sank in Matagorda Bay in 1687.

Perhaps the most eye-catching object is the mighty Fresnel lens from Matagorda Lighthouse on nearby Matagorda Island. The 1852 lens, which looks like something out of a Star Wars movie, stands in a corner of the museum, refracting the light into bursts of tiny rainbows. “It really is a work of art,” says George Anne Cormier, museum director. “During the Civil War, it was removed and buried on the island by Confederate troops, who also tried to blow up the lighthouse to keep Federal troops from using it.” Relighted in 1873, the lens was retired from duty in 1977 and is on loan to the museum from the U.S. Coast Guard.

The great outdoors is as appealing as Port Lavaca’s indoor attractions. Get your bearings at the Half-Moon Reef Lighthouse near the Lavaca Bay Causeway. It was moved here from its original site in Matagorda Bay and now serves as the visitors’ center. From there, cross the street to Lighthouse Beach, a sandy playground on the bay where you can fish from the lighted pier, swim on the man-made sand beach and camp right on the water. Lighthouse Beach is also home to the Formosa Wetlands Walkway and Alcoa Bird Tower, where you can stroll an elevated path or relax under the gazebo while looking for herons, spoonbills and other indigenous coastal birds.

Come sundown, head for the tropics – Tropics Waterfront Bar and Grill, that is. Owned and operated by Mark and The (“tay”) Nasternak, Tropics serves up fresh local seafood and, thanks to The’s Vietnamese roots, delicious spring rolls from a family recipe and honey-braised shrimp over rice noodles or rice. You can dine inside or on the wide covered deck overlooking the bay. Watch a pelican skim the surface and an occasional fish do a belly flop out of the water and you’ll surrender – as we have – to the lure of this authentic Texas coastal town.

Port Lavaca is the county seat of Calhoun County, on Texas Highway 35, about 30 miles south of Victoria and 150 miles southwest of Houston. For more information, contact Port Lavaca-Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce (800) 556-7678 or (361) 552-2959; www.portlavacainfo.com.

PHOTOS BY VIRGIL FOX

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