10/26/2026
Alabama’s Sand Island Lighthouse once guided ships into Mobile Bay. In 2009, it traveled across the country on a postage stamp.
The lighthouse appeared in the U.S. Postal Service’s Gulf Coast Lighthouses series alongside landmarks from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida.
Its history began long before that recognition. A fifty-five-foot lighthouse was established on Sand Island in 1838. A taller replacement followed in 1859, but Confederate forces destroyed that tower during the Civil War.
The surviving brick lighthouse was first lit in 1873. Automation came in 1921, and its service as an active navigational aid ended in 1933.
Erosion became another major part of its story. Land that once surrounded the station gradually disappeared, leaving the tower increasingly exposed to the Gulf.
This historic photograph, dated 1963, shows the lighthouse and a neighboring building decades after its light was deactivated. It preserves a view of the station at a particular moment in its long history.
The stamp issued in 2009 featured artwork based on photographs taken after the devastating 2005 hurricane season.
For a structure built to help mariners find their way, that small square of postage offered another kind of journey: carrying a piece of Alabama’s coast far beyond Mobile Bay.
