Drive across the Highway 90 bridge into Berwick and the red lighthouse catches your eye before the town does. It sits low on the west bank of the Atchafalaya, a squat iron pyramid painted the color of a stop sign, parked in Everett S. Berry Memorial Lighthouse Park like it has always belonged there. Most people who pass it every week could tell you it is old. Fewer could tell you it has a partner that was supposed to join it years ago and still has not shown up.
That gap, an open stretch of ground beside the tower where a second, far larger lighthouse was meant to stand, is the part of Berwick's story that does not make it into the festival flyers.
The Lighthouse That Actually Made It Home
The lighthouse on the riverbank is the Southwest Reef Light, and it did not start out anywhere near Berwick. It was built in 1858 to mark a shoal in Atchafalaya Bay and first lit on September 1, 1859, guiding ships past the reef and into the river channel. Confederate forces shut it down during the Civil War. Union troops recovered the lens and reactivated it in 1865, and it kept working for another half century, surviving an 1867 hurricane that damaged the tower badly enough to require the whole structure be raised about ten feet for stability.
Its working life ended in 1916, when a new dredged channel through Point Au Fer Shoal made it obsolete. The tower sat abandoned in shallow water for more than seventy years, rusting, until the town of Berwick arranged to bring it ashore in 1987 under state legislation that transferred ownership from Louisiana to the town. Berry Brothers General Contractors handled the move, sandblasting and partially restoring the iron plates before the tower reached its current spot in April 1990. It took until 1996 for the finishing details, doors, windows, a replica lantern room, to be complete. The lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
So the landmark everyone in Berwick recognizes on sight took nearly thirty years from decommission to full restoration. That timeline matters, because it is the same slow arc the town is now walking with a second lighthouse, except this one has not arrived at all.
One more detail worth knowing if you have never looked closely: the Southwest Reef Light also marks the finish line of the Tour de Teche, a 135-mile water race down Bayou Teche.
What The Empty Platform Is Waiting On
The second lighthouse is the Ship Shoal Light, and it is a genuinely different scale of object. Where Southwest Reef stands 37 feet tall, Ship Shoal rises 125 feet, built the same year as its future riverfront neighbor and first lit in 1860 to mark a dangerous bar in the Gulf near Last Island. It was discontinued in 1965 and left to the weather.
Berwick has owned Ship Shoal since the 1990s, and town officials first went public with a plan to move it ashore in 2019, aiming to set it up right next to Southwest Reef in the same park. In 2020, the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation put the lighthouse on its list of the state's most endangered places, and federal officials set a March 2021 deadline for the town to remove it or lose ownership back to the government. Berwick's mayor said publicly the town would meet that deadline and had already discussed building a platform in the open space beside the existing tower.
That deadline has come and gone, and as of the most recent update available, Ship Shoal Light is still sitting in the Gulf. It has not been dismantled, barged upriver, or set on a new foundation next to its smaller sibling. The empty ground in the park is not a design choice. It is a placeholder for a project that has been publicly announced twice, in 2019 and again in later coverage, without yet becoming real.
None of this means the plan is dead. Southwest Reef itself sat abandoned for over seventy years before anyone brought it home, and the town has already spent years clearing bureaucratic hurdles, endangered-places listings, ownership transfers, contractor lined up, that a project like this requires. But if you have walked past that open space in the park and wondered whether something was supposed to go there, the answer is yes, and it has been supposed to for a while now.
What Actually Happens This November
None of that history stops the town from celebrating the lighthouse it does have. The Berwick Lighthouse Festival returns for its twelfth year this November, running Friday through Sunday, November 6 through 8, along the historic Berwick riverfront around the park where Southwest Reef stands.
Based on how the festival has run in recent years, expect a weekend built around a few fixed points:
- Live music each evening, with a rotating lineup of regional acts on a riverfront stage
- Carnival rides and a midway set up along the park grounds
- Local arts and crafts vendors selling alongside food booths
- A gumbo cook-off, judged by locals, with past winners including teams like Coroner's Cuisine, a group that took the title with a lineup that included St. Mary Parish's coroner
- A pageant crowning festival queens across several age divisions
- An 8 a.m. Mass held right on the riverfront on Sunday morning
- A parade at 1 p.m. Sunday
- Fireworks over the river on Saturday night, with the lighthouse lit up in the foreground
For anyone who has been to the festival before, none of this will surprise you. What might is realizing the festival is, in a real sense, a celebration of a rescue that took decades to finish, staged next to an empty spot that represents a second rescue still in progress.
The Thing Worth Watching For
If Ship Shoal Light ever does make the trip upriver, it will change the shape of that park permanently. A 125-foot tower next to a 37-foot one is not a subtle addition, and the festival that has spent twelve years centered on a single lighthouse would suddenly have two very different stories to tell side by side: one about a small iron tower that came home in 1987 and took until 1996 to look finished, and one about a much bigger structure that spent over a century in open water before anyone brought it in.
For now, the only lighthouse festival-goers will see this November is the one that has been there since 1990. But the empty ground beside it is not empty by accident, and knowing why is the kind of thing that turns a familiar landmark into a story worth telling the next person who asks what that red tower is doing on the riverbank.
If you are already thinking ahead to next year's festival, or you are simply curious what a Berwick address near the riverfront actually looks like day to day, Lori Broussard has spent years working this stretch of St. Mary Parish and is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a free consultation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.
