By Michael Graczyk

The Associated Press

SABINE PASS, Texas — The bronze likeness of Confederate Lt. Dick Dowling has survived two hurricanes in the last five years, as against the odds as the few dozen rebel Texas soldiers he led to victory against a huge Union force almost 150 years ago.

But the double whammy of 2005’s Hurricane Rita and last year’s Ike left the Sabine Pass Battleground Park in shambles. Trees were toppled and ripped out. Historical markers were snapped off and creature comforts for visitors were swept away in one of Texas’ few Civil War battlefield sites.

The 57-acre park on the coastal Texas-Louisiana border is considered one of the nation’s most threatened Civil War battlefields by the Civil War Preservation Trust. Now after a healthy dose of tender loving care from the man who alone oversees park maintenance, and a $600,000 rebuilding program directed by the Texas Historical Commission, the battlefield site is on track to reopen near the end of summer.

For the nearby tiny town of Sabine Pass, where new mobile homes dot the coastal landscape amid the remains of broken structures mangled by the two storms, the park’s reopening would mark another step in recovery.

“I think it would mean a great deal,” said Kellie Brown, who works at Tammie’s Diner, a mobile food truck that just opened in May, giving folks here now two places to eat outside of home. “That’s been here long before we were and it’s part of why we’re here.”

The park is adjacent to offshore oil supply yards still scarred by debris and a few blocks from town, where the Sabine Pass school, the biggest building around, was among the few places relatively unscathed by Ike. Crews are repaving the main street, which should go to Galveston about 70 miles to the southwest but in reality has been wiped out west of town for years by recurring storms.

The park, which opened in 1974, draws history buffs, families on picnics and fishermen. Typically, a couple hundred anglers on weekends line the concrete walkway on the riverbank.

The Sabine River mouth at the Gulf of Mexico made the area a strategic commercial and military site and prompted establishment of Fort Griffin, an earthwork fort bolstered by ship timbers and railroad iron and equipped with six artillery pieces. It was unfinished on Sept. 8, 1863, when four Union gunboats entered the river, leading a force of transports carrying thousands of ground troops intent on wresting Texas from the Confederacy.

Richard W. “Dick” Dowling, then a 25-year-old Ireland-born Houston saloon owner, and his 47 primarily Irish troops from Houston and Galveston who made up Company F Texas Heavy Artillery took less than an hour to disable two of the gunboats, leaving the river channel blocked. They took 300 prisoners and seized the two damaged gunboats, compelling the remainder of the Union fleet to withdraw and bringing a swift end to one of only five Civil War battles in Texas.

About 60 Union soldiers and sailors were killed or missing. None of Dowling’s men was lost.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis repeatedly called the victory by the Texas troops “the most amazing achievement in military history,” according to Ed Cotham, a Civil War historian from Houston whose books include one about the Sabine Pass battle.

The statue of Dowling at the battlefield was erected in 1936 as part of Texas’ centennial celebration. It shows him bare-chested with a cannon-ready flaming torch in one hand and binoculars in the other, surveying the Sabine River a stone’s throw away.

Hurricane Rita scored a direct hit on the area and maintenance manager Efrem Hill, who has worked at the park for more than seven years, figures the bronze Dowling endured a storm surge that reached his chest, easily 10 feet high. The damage at the surrounding park was so severe the place had to close.

Then Ike, judging from a flooded concrete bunker that serves as Hill’s tool shed, inundated the park with at least 12 feet of water, meaning Dowling’s head barely poked above the stormy waters.

“Rita tore us up,” said Hill, who lost a mobile home where he lived. “Ike finished it. But everybody is looking forward to coming back.”

When Hill returned following Ike, he was greeted by a debris-strewn park, including a “big old long timber” stuck to the statue. It took weeks to remove industrial containers, wood pallets and other trash as Hill’s wife and children joined him in the cleanup.

More severe damage, however, left riverside walkways undermined by erosion, a boat launch area destroyed and rest rooms obliterated, still being replaced after Rita.

Hill said he gets dozens of calls from people eager to see the park reopened for the first time since 2005. About 45,000 people visited that year, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department figures.

“We have a lot of people waiting for the park to be reopened and visitation to the park should help in the revitalization of these areas that have suffered so much from storms,” Cotham said.

Hill said the park probably will reopen in September — just in time for the most dangerous part of the hurricane season that starts this weekend.

“I hope and pray we get a break this year,” Hill said. “I wouldn’t want to see anybody else get it. I just hope everybody gets passed by.”