There’s an old line about the Golden Gate Bridge that says the painters start at one end, work their way across, and by the time they reach the other side it’s time to start over. As far as I know, that isn’t literally how the bridge gets looked after. But it’s a pretty good way to describe a job that never really feels finished.<\/p>\n
So it caught my eye that Travis Davis used the same comparison for a battleship. Davis is the chief operating officer of the Battleship Texas Foundation, the nonprofit that runs USS Texas, and he told the Houston Chronicle that the work aboard her “is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.”<\/p>\n
He isn’t exaggerating by much. Texas has been sitting in a Galveston shipyard for a little over four years.<\/p>\n
If you haven’t been following this one, USS Texas is a 27,000-ton battleship that’s 573 feet long and carries ten 14-inch guns in five twin turrets. Displacement is basically the weight of the water a ship pushes out of the way, which works out to the weight of the ship itself. Texas was commissioned in March 1914, and the foundation calls her the last surviving battleship to serve in both World War I and World War II. The Navy handed her to the State of Texas in 1948, and she spent the next 74 years as a museum ship next to the San Jacinto Battleground, outside Houston.<\/p>\n
Those 74 years are the problem. The water she sat in on the Houston Ship Channel is warm and brackish, and it ate away at her hull for decades. She started leaking. She closed to the public in 2019. Eventually four tugboats towed her about 40 miles down to Gulf Copper’s yard in Galveston for a proper repair.<\/p>\n
Most of the heavy work happened in a dry dock. If you’ve never seen one, a dry dock is a basin (or, in this case, a floating platform) that a ship sails into before the water gets pumped out, leaving the whole hull sitting high and dry so people can walk underneath it. Texas spent about 18 months in there, which the Chronicle reports was six months longer than the foundation had planned.<\/p>\n
According to the foundation, Gulf Copper replaced about 700 tons of steel hull plating below the waterline during that stretch. Crews also cut away the underwater sections of her torpedo blisters and rebuilt them to a slightly different design.<\/p>\n
Torpedo blisters are those bulges you’ll see along the sides of older battleships. They were added to Texas in the mid-1920s, and the idea is pretty simple. A torpedo blows a hole in an outer compartment instead of the main hull, so the ship keeps floating and keeps fighting.<\/p>\n
Davis has said the ship doesn’t leak anymore, which is frankly a big deal for a hull that spent decades soaking in the Houston Ship Channel. And 19FortyFive, citing the foundation, reported in September that the steel work it had lined up for this round of repairs is finished.<\/p>\n
Here’s a detail I didn’t expect to find in a restoration story. On May 18, the 114th anniversary of her launch, Texas fired blank charges from her forward 14-inch turret. A blank is just the powder charge with no shell, so you get the flash, the smoke and the noise without anything leaving the barrel.<\/p>\n
Then on July 3, she fired a 14-inch gun salute as part of Galveston’s kickoff for America’s 250th birthday, with the crowd watching from Pier 21 on the waterfront. I’d honestly have paid good money to hear that.<\/p>\n
Those guns have a pretty serious r\u00e9sum\u00e9. On D-Day, the foundation says Texas fired 255 of her 14-inch shells at Pointe du Hoc in 34 minutes before shifting fire toward Omaha Beach. Nine days later, on June 15, 1944, her crew did something a lot stranger.<\/p>\n
Why would anyone flood their own battleship on purpose?<\/p>\n
Range, basically. Texas needed to hit a target farther inland than her guns could normally reach, so her crew flooded the torpedo blister on her starboard side. That gave the ship a two-degree lean, which tipped the guns up a little higher and pushed the shells a little farther. It’s a wonderfully low-tech fix, and it’s arguably the best story this ship has.<\/p>\n
Texas isn’t staying at the shipyard. Galveston’s Wharves Board voted unanimously in March 2025 to give her Pier 15 as a permanent berth, and the foundation finalized that deal in July 2025, according to USNI News<\/a>. The pier sits between the cruise terminals, about a 10-minute walk from the Strand District, so if you’ve ever boarded a cruise ship in Galveston, you’ve been pretty close to it.<\/p>\n Davis also pointed out to the Chronicle that the ship’s bow is aimed straight at her new home. She’s moored at Gulf Copper, across the channel from the pier she’s supposed to end up at.<\/p>\n Getting her there isn’t as simple as hooking up a couple of tugs, though. The foundation’s own to-do list before the move includes finishing the engineering for the moorings, getting permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other regulators, dredging the berth at Pier 15, and building the moorings and the shoreside facilities.<\/p>\n When Davis spoke to the Chronicle, the foundation hadn’t filed for those permits yet, and he figured the process could take nine months to a year. I can’t find anything public saying whether the applications have gone in since then. 19FortyFive reported in September that the foundation is aiming to reopen in 2027, most likely in the second quarter, depending on when Pier 15 is ready. My guess is the permits will set the pace far more than the paint will.<\/p>\n Museum ships really don’t like to move, as it turns out. In Norfolk, it took about a year of planning to push the battleship Wisconsin four feet off her pier<\/a> to swap out two fenders. And in Louisiana, the destroyer USS Kidd has been waiting on the Mississippi River to rise<\/a> before she can get back to Baton Rouge.<\/p>\n Mostly the State of Texas, which means if you pay taxes there, you’ve already chipped in. The foundation’s FAQ page<\/a> puts the projected cost of the restoration at $75 million, and says the Texas Legislature has funded $60 million of that. Davis told the Chronicle he expects the foundation to spend around $82 million by the time it’s all done.<\/p>\n On top of that, the foundation is raising another $15 million through a campaign it calls “Bring Her Home.” That money is meant for the visitor side of things: 60 restored spaces, interactive exhibits, extra restrooms and year-round climate control. Climate control on a steel battleship in a Galveston summer sounds like the item I’d fund first, if I’m being honest.<\/p>\n With the steel done, the work aboard Texas has moved on to the stuff visitors will actually walk on and look at. The new deck is made of East Texas yellow pine, about 36,000 square feet of it, laid in 3.5-inch-square planks over the steel deck underneath. The gaps get packed with cotton and oakum, sealed with caulk, sanded flush and painted. The hull is going back into Measure 21, the dark blue camouflage Texas wore in the Pacific in 1945. Inside, volunteers are scraping and repainting the casemates on the second deck, which the foundation plans to use as classrooms and overnight berths for school groups once she reopens.<\/p>\n So yes, painting the Golden Gate Bridge sounds about right.<\/p>\nSo who’s paying for all this?<\/h2>\n
Right now, it’s mostly wood and paint<\/h2>\n