Inn · Port Aransas, Texas · Built 1925 (on a site used since 1886)
Tarpon Inn
A long two-story frame fishing hotel of 1925 on Mustang Island, rebuilt in the "barracks" style of the 1886 original, with hurricane-proofed galleries and a lobby papered in thousands of signed tarpon scales.
History
In the 1880s the tip of Mustang Island became a destination for sport fishermen after the silver tarpon that ran in the pass. In 1886 Frank Stephenson, later assistant keeper of the Aransas lighthouse, bought lumber from a Civil War barracks that had housed the crew building the Mansfield jetty and used it to build the first Tarpon Inn, reachable only by a sixteen-mile boat ride. Mary Cotter managed it, and the settlement itself was called Tarpon until 1912. The building burned in 1900; two new ones went up by 1904, and the hurricane of 1919, with its fifteen-foot surge, destroyed the larger and wrecked the smaller, which limped on as the hotel until 1926.
James M. Ellis, who leased the property, bought the land in 1923 and in 1925, with backing from sportsmen guests led by J.B. Earle of Waco, built the present inn without an architect, copying the old barracks form as closely as he could. The surviving older building became the dining room. Port Aransas called itself the tarpon capital of the world, and its heyday ran from the 1920s to about 1940. Guests included Aimee Semple McPherson, Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan and the animal trainer Clyde Beatty, who kept his pet lion in his room; Duncan Hines recommended the kitchen. Franklin Roosevelt fished nearby in 1937 and signed a scale, though he probably never stayed. After the war the tarpon left this coast, the Ellis family sold after Hurricane Celia in 1970, and the inn was repaired and reopened in 1975.
“Sound construction makes the Tarpon Inn one of the few large structures of this type to remain on the coast.”
Architecture
The inn is a simple two-story frame building under a long, unbroken hipped roof that overhangs double galleries on square posts. It faces northeast to catch the Gulf breeze, and its twenty-six rooms open directly onto the gallery. The walls are clapboard of double and triple thickness. To survive storms, a telephone pole runs up the core of each gallery post, anchored to the roof and set in twenty feet of concrete, and pilings under each room's corners are sunk sixteen feet. Private baths and air conditioning came in 1956. The old dining-room building behind lost its upper story and cupola to a 1958 fire. In the lobby, some 7,500 signed and dated tarpon scales cover the walls.
What to look for
- Double galleries under one long hipped roof
- Thick square gallery posts hiding anchored poles
- Lobby walls covered with signed tarpon scales
- The scale signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Former dining-room building behind the inn
Setting
The inn stands on Cotter Avenue in the old center of Port Aransas, near the north tip of Mustang Island where Aransas Pass opens to the Gulf of Mexico. The harbor, jetties and ferry landing are a few blocks away, and the Aransas Pass Light Station, also on the National Register, stands across the channel on Harbor Island.
Timeline
- 1886Frank Stephenson builds the first Tarpon Inn from barracks lumber
- 1900First inn burns
- 1919Hurricane destroys the larger replacement building
- 1925James M. Ellis builds the present inn
- 1937Franklin D. Roosevelt fishes off Port Aransas
- 1970Hurricane Celia; Ellis family sells
- 1975Repaired and reopened
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia says Duncan Hines married and honeymooned at the inn; the nomination says only that he recommended its restaurant.
- The Ellis family's own account dates their purchase to 1925; the nomination says Ellis bought the land in 1923.
