Marconi Tower at Port Arthur College
1500 Procter, Port Arthur, TX<p>The Marconi wireless telegraph tower at Lamar State College-Port Arthur was built in 1909 as the key educational component of the new vocational school, then known as "Port Arthur College." The Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company, headed by radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, donated the 50-foot tall antenna that was mounted on top of the steel tower, as well as the instruments needed to teach the wireless telegraphy to students at the school. Port Arthur College students greatly benefited from the tower's placement, gaining hands-on experience by sending and receiving messages to and from vessels on the high seas via the tower. Later used as a radio broadcast tower, the structure served both the college and the Port Arthur community at large through 1978. Although the 130-foot tower no longer supports a broadcast antenna, the structure retains a good degree of integrity. As the oldest structure on campus, the tower serves as a reminder of the earliest days of the college and is nominated to the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion A, in the areas of Education and Communications, at the local level of significance. The period of significance was 1909-1958.</p><p>Port Arthur is on State Highway 87, 17 miles southeast of Beaumont in southeast Jefferson County. In 1895, Kansas railroad promoter Arthur E. Stilwell and his financial backers established the city of Port Arthur on the western shore of Sabine Lake as the terminus of the Kansas City, Pittsburg, and Gulf Railroad. In 1897 the Port Arthur Channel and Dock Co. began cutting a canal to reach deep water at Sabine Pass. With the completion of the canal in 1899, Port Arthur became a true port. By the fall of 1897, the population reached 860, and the city incorporated the following year. The railroad went into receivership in the spring of 1899, but the city's proximity to the Spindletop oilfield (first tapped in 1901), placed Port Arthur near the heart of the state's primary oil region. Major oil companies soon established facilities in Port Arthur, including Gulf and Texaco, which built refineries in 1901 and 1902, respectively. By 1914, the city had become the second-largest oil-refining point in the nation, and the population exploded to 7,663 in 1910 and 50,902 by 1930.<br><br></p>
Local significance of the structure:Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.