As we move westward away from the eastern fourth of Dauphin Island we should point out that unlike the other sandy Mississippi Sound barrier islands as well as the west end of this island, the eastern quarter of Dauphin has a core made up of Pleistocene sediments that crop out at the shore of the Gulf. This rocky Pleistocene substrata along with the rip rap rocks at Fort Gaines, the high dunes on the Gulf side and construction of bulkheads on the Sound shore have stabilized erosion on the eastern part with the exception of some of the beaches on the Gulf side. Pleistocene is a geological term referring to the most recent sequence of geologic time. This term was coined in 1839 by a Scotsman named Charles Lyell who is often referred to as "The Father of Modern Geology." Lyell voyaged from Mobile to New Orleans aboard a 185 foot steamboat through Grant's Pass on the north end of the present-day Dauphin Island bridge on the night of Monday, February 23, 1846. The steamboat on this overnight voyage drew only seven feet of water when fully loaded and traveled at about 9 miles per hour. Lyell appreciated the quiet of its low pressure engines after experiencing the noise and vibration of the high pressure river steamer he had ridden on upstream against the current to Tuscaloosa. Those boats made sleeping, reading or writing almost impossible. Lyell in a way was following the path of many other early men of science who also voyaged through the waters off Dauphin Island. Bernard Romans, British naturalist and surveyor, came to Dauphin Island in 1771 and published his comprehensive map of Mobile Bay in 1774. In 1777,  William Bartram, the noted American botanist, spent a night stranded in a boat grounded on an oyster bar near Dauphin Island. Bartram also spent time on the Tensaw River Plantation of Major Robert Farmar, namesake of the island's Major Farmer Street and whose family was one of three who submitted separate private claims to Dauphin Island after it came under the jurisdiction of the United States in 1813. In 1799, Andrew Ellicott, the surveyor who laid out Washington, D.C. and established the first curriculum at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, sailed into Mobile Bay as he mapped the entire Northern Gulf Coast during his survey of the first U.S. Southern Boundary. In 1847, Alexander Dallas Bache visited the island and personally directed the measurements for the first three baselnes of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and placed granite survey markers on DAUPHIN ISLAND. Beach erosion destroyed the site of one of the markers and it was moved inside Ft. Gaines. Although it is not in its original location, it now stands in the old fort's courtyard as the oldest such marker on the entire Gulf Coast.

Grant's Pass





Little Dauphin Island

Pass Drury

Canal to Billy Goat Hole

Chuggae Point

Aloe Bay

Point Isabel

Bayou Heron

Petit Bois Island

Katrina and BP Oil Spill

Fort Powell

lyell's visit https://archive.org/stream/asecondvisittou01lyelgoog#page/n126/mode/2up