Gulf Coast

The area now known as the Mississippi Gulf Coast came under French rule in 1699 when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville established several outposts during his mission to control the Mississippi River. Native peoples, including the Biloxi and Pascagoula tribes, had made annual trips to the region in their seasonal migration. The tourist culture that grew up here in the nineteenth century can be interpreted as a continuation of this cyclical relocation as winter-weary visitors from Chicago and summer-weary residents from New Orleans found refuge in the moderate temperatures and cooling breezes of waterfront estates.

Until the mid-twentieth century the beachfront was a marshy world merging with the Mississippi Sound, a shallow body of water extending from Waveland to Dauphin Island, Alabama, protected from the waves of the Gulf by barrier islands. A visitor in the 1910s, driving along the beachfront shell road or passing in a boat, would have observed Mississippi’s “Six Sisters”—Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, and Pascagoula. Glimpsed through spreading live oak trees hung with Spanish moss, tall pine trees, and glossy magnolias, large estate houses and a few small hotels lined the seventy-mile-long coastline. Many houses stood tall on masonry piers, an architectural adaptation seen elsewhere in the South but most functional in this coastal setting, where hurricanes regularly drove storm surges far inland. “Shoo-flies” raised wooden pavilions built up around the largest trees near the beach, allowed relaxation in breezy shade above the mosquitoes. Long piers terminated by gazebos stretched out from many residences, their repeating pattern broken only by the town centers, where yacht clubs vied with shrimp boats in their harbors, and oyster-processing warehouses and canneries crowded the shoreline.

Beginning in the 1920s, seawall construction on the south side of the beach road gradually eliminated the waterfront marshes. Harrison County’s twenty-seven-mile seawall, completed in 1954, acts in concert with the longest man-made beach in the United States, its white sand dredged from the Sound. After World War II, these beaches allowed the Coast to become fully engaged in the middle-class tourist culture generated by the automobile, but they also brought negative environmental and cultural effects. Without the buffering marshes, hurricanes battering the Coast between June and November have exacted higher and higher property losses. The sea wall and the man-made beaches transformed the marshy informal spaces, where blacks and whites had mixed in traditional coastal activities such as fishing, crabbing, and oystering, into commercial and recreational spaces for whites only. The racial tension over this new arrangement eventually led to the 1960 “Wade-In” movement, when African Americans reasserted their right to swim in the Sound.

The influence of New Orleans on the Mississippi Coast is strong. New Orleanians own many of the beachfront residences, with some families owning them for generations. Architects from that city received many of the building commissions until well into the twentieth century. Creole cottages—rare in the rest of the state—are common here, as are above-ground cemeteries typical of New Orleans. And where most Mississippi towns have a Baptist or Methodist church near their town center, on the Coast a Catholic church forms the focus of many neighborhoods. Most recently, Slavs, Vietnamese, and Latinos have formed their own ethnic enclaves around Catholic mission churches.

When Category 5 Hurricane Camille hit in 1969, with winds reaching 175 miles per hour, Mississippi Coast residents thought that they had seen the worst that nature could offer. They were wrong. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore near Waveland with a record storm surge that devastated the Coast from Pearlington to Pascagoula. This seventy-mile beachfront held fourteen historic districts, including one of the state’s largest along Bay St. Louis’s Beach Boulevard and one of its most architecturally significant in Pass Christian’s Scenic Drive. Buildings that did survive cannot fully be understood without considering their vanished neighbors.

With public agencies rebuilding infrastructure and private volunteer organizations lending assistance to residents, the Coast’s recovery has advanced in fits and starts affected by the national economy. Architect-led initiatives have ranged from Andrés Duany’s New Urbanist town-specific planning guides to personalized designs for low-income homeowners by Architecture for Humanity and the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. Many beachfront lots remain vacant, but most historic neighborhoods a few blocks inland have recovered and thrive.