On our last day in Biloxi, we took in the Visitors Center that’s next to the lighthouse we’ve shown you. We walked through the history of the city from the first Canadian hero who claimed the area for France in 1699 to its “heroes” today to the industries and pleasure times available along the Gulf Coast. The city celebrated its 325th birthday in 2024. What a great celebration they must have had!
first people to settle here
Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (baptized July 20, 1661, in Ville-Marie [now Montreal, Canada] and died on July 9, 1706, Havana, Cuba) was a French-Canadian naval hero and explorer, noted for his exploration and battles on behalf of the French in Hudson Bay and in the territory of Louisiana. [But Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the most famous expedition to explore the Louisiana Territory from 1804 to 1806 that was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson.]
In 1720, eight-eight French women volunteered to travel from Lorient, France on a “Dutch built” flute to Biloxi, the capital of the French Louisiana colony. According to AI, this boat was “a 17th-century, three-masted, specialized merchant vessel designed for maximum cargo capacity with minimal crew and cost. Developed in the Netherlands, these ships featured a distinctive, narrow-decked, pear-shaped hull, making them the most efficient cargo carriers of their time.”
The female adventures arrived on January 8, 1721, when they anchored on Ship Island close to the coast. Their names were lost (misfiled) until discovered in 1987 when they were published in a well known magazine.
First France tried to settle the Louisiana colony using criminals and deportees. The local governor wasn’t pleased with these men. The King’s Council then issued an edict that prohibited sending criminals to Louisiana.
Women from an orphanage in Paris were selected as the first group to travel to the colony. Two months later the brides in our story-line left the Brittany Coast to come here.
The women were “housed” at Ft. Maurepas, the temporary capital, in Old Biloxi that’s present day Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Sixty brides were married while staying at the fort. The women settled in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois, and Arkansas. Their descendants today extend across North America.
Biloxi tourism pre-Civil War
In the early 1800s, the Biloxi peninsula had only a few French-speaking families. But life began to change in 1827 when travelers could take a train or carriage from New Orleans north to the shores of Lake Ponchartrain where they could board a steamboat that could take them to Mobile with a stop at Biloxi. Biloxi started to grow and develop as a resort.
The summer exodus of the New Orleans wealthy who wanted relief from the city’s heat and yellow fever season swelled Biloxi’s population. Many of them built summer homes, and others built hotels. Biloxi become the largest of the “watering places” along the Mississippi Coast by the 1840s. Antebellum tourism thrived—until the Federal blockade of the Mississippi Sound during the Civil War.
tourism from the Civil War to WWII
In 1870 after the Civil War, steamboat service was replaced by a coastal railroad.
Railroad connections through New Orleans and Mobile turned Biloxi into a year-round resort. Fast-moving trains brought “snowbirds” from the Northern and Midwestern states so they could escape the harsh winters back home. [Remember in the previous post that Louis Sullivan came south from Chicago to find a place where he could relax? These railroad connections were how he traveled.]
In 1906, the Biloxi Tourist Club was formed with a membership representing 35 states.
Pictorial promotion brochures enticed vacationers from across the country. By 1928, several new multi-storied hotels faced the beachfront, but then tourism waned after the 1929 stock market disaster and the ensuing Great Depression.
Biloxi tourism after WWII
After the war, Biloxi regained its resort status with the widening of the beach road into a 4-lane superhighway and the creation of the longest man-made sand beach in the world. By the mid-1950s, neon advertised hotels, motels, restaurants, nightclubs, and other tourist-oriented businesses filled the city. [Today it’s the casinos along the beach.]
One of Biloxi’s first grand hotels was the Buena Vista Hotel & Convention Center that operated from 1924 to the 1980s. Today it’s on the site of the MGM Park. It offered fishing, boating, access to golfing, trips to local Ship Island, and other tourist attractions.
The event, sponsored by St. Michael Catholic Church, has opened the shrimp season since 1929. Over time it’s become a big Biloxi tourist attraction. More about it later in this post.
then the hurricanes
In 1969, Hurricane Camille brought tourism to a standstill, and the city stagnated in the 1970s. Then in the 1980s, Biloxi began emphasizing its history, heritage, and culture to bolster tourism.
Biloxi entered the 21st century as a major casino resort destination with visitors numbering more than 3 million annually.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city as the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history. Katrina’s water surge destroyed irreplaceable landmarks and severely crippled the resort industry. Post-Katrina laws that allowed on-land casinos was a key factor in the tourism recovery. We saw a movie about the damage from Katrina while in the visitors center; it was depressing for us just to watch what happened and listen to the locals describe their experiences.
Mardi Gras at the Visitors Center
As mentioned in post 2 for this trip, Mardi Gras was starting to be celebrated in Biloxi.
I had no idea what “Soleil Bonne Vivantes” meant, so of course I looked it up. Here’s what I found on the only website I could find that was in English: “Les Bonnes Vivantes are a dazzling group of entrepreneurial women devoted to bathing in life’s finest pleasures, not solely for Mardi Gras but every day.”
lighthouse over the years
In 1844, the state’s legislature approved a lighthouse in Biloxi; just 3 years later, the U.S. Congress approved $12,000 [$475,000 today] for the project. It was only the 3rd cast iron lighthouse built in the U.S. and the first in the South. It arrived in spring 1848 and erected on the beach opposite the deep-water harbor at Ship Island. A brick lining strengthened the tower.
The tower stood dark until November 1866 when the lens was returned so it could cast its light 13-nautical miles across the sound.
After 5 years of neglect, repairs to the lighthouse included a coating of black pitch to prevent rusting. It was repainted white in 1867, but its temporary black condition encouraged a legend that the black lighthouse was to mourn the death of Abraham Lincoln. Biloxi promoters used this story for years to draw visitors from Northern states. Late in the 1900s, historians disproved the story.
Decorations over the years have been used on the lighthouse. The city mourned the assassination of President Kennedy with a wreath on the lighthouse door and black bunting draped on the surrounding fence. Over the years the lighthouse has been decorated with garlands and lights during the holidays.
The lighthouse has weathered nearly 20 hurricanes over more of its 160 years of service.
- 1860: The storm surge from a hurricane severely damaged the foundation so that it started leaning 2 feet to one side. By excavating sand from under the lighthouse’s opposite side, gravity did his work to repair the lighthouse.
- August 17, 1969: Hurricane Camille smashed into the Mississippi Gulf with 200-mile per hour winds and a huge tidal surge. Biloxi’s beachfront was destroyed, and 172 lives were taken, along with scores of architectural treasures. Fortunately the lighthouse only had minor damage. Camille became the storm by which all storms would be measured—until Hurricane Katrina.
- August 23, 2005: The record storm surge damaged the brick lining and destroyed the lighthouse’s electrical system. Winds ripped off the door and smashed windows in the light cupola. After the storm, the lighthouse took on iconic significance. It stood tall amid the destruction all around it. Within hours, city workers hung an American flag from the cupola railing where it would remain throughout the repair and restoration process.
On February 19, 2010, after a 14-month $400,000 repair and restoration, the Biloxi Lighthouse was rededicated. It’s now proudly displayed on Mississippi’s state license tags and featured on a series of U.S. postal stamps. Lighthouses on the Gulf Coast are no longer a beacon to seafarers, this lighthouse is part of Biloxi’s identity and a symbol of the city’s strength and resilience.
city heroes
Keesler Air Force Base is named for Mississippi native, Lt. Keesler, who was a Silver Medal Award recipient for a reconnaissance mission in WWI. He and his pilot fought off an attack by the Germans, and Keesler took down the leader of the 4 enemy aircraft before Keesler’s plane crash-landed.
Riley said Keesler was shot 6 times, with wounds to the chest and abdomen. The two men were eventually captured by German ground troops and held prisoner, and Keesler died the next day because he didn’t have any medical attention. Riley said that Keesler’s fortitude as a wounded prisoner of war impressed his captors. [The links in this paragraph give us more information about these men and what happened to them.]
While John Grisham was born in Arkansas, he moved to Mississippi in 1967 when he was 12 years old. First trained as an accountant and a lawyer, he then served in the Mississippi House of Representatives. His novel The Runaway Jury (written in 1996) is set in Biloxi and is populated with characters based on recognizable local residents.
One of the most recognizable men over the last 30 years for those who like his laid-back, tropical vibe has been Jimmy Buffett. Not just one style of music has been able to capture what his music that many of us still enjoy.
He was born in 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi. We saw his boyhood home in a previous post.
While he sometimes performed in Biloxi’s beachfront clubs, he recorded his first album in Nashville. So, are you a “Parrothead”?
Fred Haise grew up in Biloxi and was selected to be an astronaut in 1966. Wikipedia tells us that “Fred Wallace Haise Jr. is an American former NASA astronaut, engineer, fighter pilot with the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, and a test pilot. He is one of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, having served as Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 13.”
seafood industry’s history
If you enjoyed our earlier post about the Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum, you’ll enjoy this additional information.
As Biloxi’s seafood industry boomed, more labor was needed to man the boats and work in the factories. The solution? Transport workers from Baltimore who were called Bohemians. A few of these families put down roots here, but most migrated seasonally until WWII started.
Another immigrant group, Slaves from the Dalmatian Coast of the Adriatic Sea [what we know as Croatia] began coming here in the late 1800s. Many who called themselves Austrians had settled in New Orleans. Others were sent here directly from Ellis Island by immigration officials.
In 1914, seafood companies contracted the first group of Acadian French (later called Cajuns) from South Louisiana. These workers, along with the Yugoslavs, became the backbone of the industry. They spoke different languages while working side-by-side, but their common denominator was their Catholic religion.
Major canning companies provided housing for their workers, called CC Camps, that consisted of long buildings with individual family apartments. Before child labor laws were passed in the state in 1912, some children worked long hours alongside their parents.
These two groups of people wanted a better life for their children, so many children worked until 8 a.m., went to school, and sometimes returned to work afterwards.
Over the years, new technologies and improvements made positive changes to the seafood industry. In the late 1970s, new Vietnamese immigrants arrived to work in the industry. Like the groups of workers before them, they came to stay and now are a part of the culture.
early canning, oysters, shrimping
Early factory workers were paid with factory-coined tokens (as shown in one of the following pictures), which they could redeem for full face value at the company store or at banks for a lesser value. When the government determined that tokens were a form of counterfeit money, these tokens could no longer be used.
When these green nickels turned up in local cash registers, Biloxians began calling them “shrimp nickels.”
Early canning companies owned their own fleets of schooners that were shallow draft with retractable centerboards. These boats were designed to fish the shallow Mississippi Sound and the Louisiana marshes.
The schooners were equipped with hand-cranked winches that pulled up heavy iron dredges filled with large quantities of oysters. Sometimes that catch overflowed the decks, so the captains attached high free boards to prevent the oysters from falling back into the water.
The early method of shrimping was by seine. [Definition is from Dictionary.com: seine is a fishing net that hangs vertically in the water with floats at the top and weights at the bottom edge, the ends being drawn together to encircle the fish.]
From the anchored schooner, men set out in skiffs loaded with large seines, some as long as 1800 feet. Some men went overboard and pulled one of the seine as the skiff was rowed in a circle around the shrimp.
The methods of fishing changed when the first gas-powered lugger, a small fishing boat, chugged into Biloxi in 1912. These luggers could pull a trawl with ease.
canning revolutionized
Seafood was a staple of Gulf Coast diets until the railroad came in 1870 and artificial ice made a new industry possible in Biloxi and the rest of the Gulf Coast. After the railroad opened between New Orleans and Mobile, oysters packed in ice could be shipped inland.
In 1867, experiments with canning shrimp started in New Orleans. In 1880, a group of five men formed a partnership to can seafood after learning about the latest canning techniques in Baltimore, a major seafood-processing city.
The next year, the partners opened Biloxi’s first seafood canning factory. They were so successful, that the men dissolved their partnership and set up their own competitive companies. Soon other investors set up their own companies.
By 1890, the local workforce couldn’t meet the demands of the growing industry, the Sea Coast Packing Company transported the first group of transient workers from Baltimore to work the winter dredging season. Soon a yearly migration for the European immigrants, who were mainly Polish but called themselves Bohemians.
By the early 1900s, several large canning companies operated in various areas in Biloxi Within 4 years, the city eclipsed Baltimore as the Seafood Capital of the World.
sailing for pleasure
For years, people along the Mississippi Gulf Coast enjoyed the piers along the sound’s shore, and sailing became a favorite pastime.
1888 was the first year of the Biloxi schooner races. When these boats were used for work, they carried 3 sails and a 6-man crew; but on race days, more sails were added and up to 35 crew members served as ballast.
The races gained national attention, and by 1933 they were a weekly event. Thousands lined the shore, the Biloxi Yacht Club was filled to overflowing, and many cheered from boats anchored along the racecourse as the “white-winged queens” vied for the winning prize—a keg of beer.
From 1922-1934, the Biloxi Elks Club sponsored a 4th of July celebration featuring a bathing beauty contest, stage entertainment, food booths, and sailing races.
Summer was filled with big sailing regattas that could last for several days. Races featured different categories of boats, including the popular fish class. Hotels offered boat excursions to the local island and up the rivers. A popular excursion during the 1940s and 50s was on board the catboat, Gee Gee, designed and build by a local man.
Since 1929, the annual “Blessing of the Fleet” has been held at the beginning of the shrimping season. As the decorated boats would pass in parade, the Catholic bishop blessed each one and prays for the safety of the fishermen and for a good catch.
Annually, the deep-sea fishing rodeo still attracts expert anglers from all over the coast to compete for cash prizes. Experienced charter boat captains transports recreational fishermen to trawlers, buoys, and oil drilling platforms that are frequently the best places to fish.
It’s sad to say good-bye to Biloxi, but we’re really looking forward to seeing what Natchez has to show us. Let’s get on the road!
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