I was born and raised in the Port Arthur area and my earliest childhood memories include visits to the "Jetty" as a small child, where at low tide the remains..was told it was part of the boiler/engine room fittings of iron...the wood having long rotted away.. of one of the Union gunboats (believe it was the USS Clifton)that were sunk in the Battle of Sabine Pass. I believe the "walking beam" from the Clifton was mounted on a monument in Beaumont during the 1930s-50s (may still be). My mother had worked for the Port Arthur News in the late 1920s told of an incident during that era when two young men, "hunting rabbits" at the site of the old fortifications had fired into one of the mounds, above the tide level of the swamp, and a powder magazine left from the WBTS (then over 60 years earlier) had exploded and injured them. Think that was a veiled warning from her because skipping school to go down to old "Fort Dowling" (as we referred to it) was a daring pass time for our high school years in the late 1940s-early 50s. At that time, the only marker was a stone erected during the 1930s with a brief history of the battle. I left for military service in 1953 and unfortunately have not been back to Sabine Pass since. Does anyone know if further improvements/memorials were established during the Civil War cent. period of the 1960s?