The small Pascagoula Indian tribe inhabited this area before the French arrived in 1699. Sparsely settled by Euro-Americans until the 1870s, when Piney Woods lumbermen began floating timber down the Pascagoula River for export, Pascagoula incorporated in 1904 as a merger of three communities: Scranton, the county seat situated near the depot, Krebsville to the north, and Pascagoula along the beach. From 1903 to 1925, a streetcar system connected them and ran north to the Dantzler Lumber Mill in Moss Point.
The Port of Pascagoula, which extends into Moss Point, preceded Gulfport’s deepwater harbor. Both emphasized lumber and commodity shipping, but Pascagoula took advantage of its wide, deep river to expand into commercial shipbuilding during World War I. With incentives from Mississippi’s Balance Agriculture with Industry (BAWI) economic development program, Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation located its shipyard here in 1938, and Pascagoula’s population, which had doubled during World War I, doubled again to ten thousand in World War II. Ingalls and such industries as Mississippi Chemical (now Phosphates) and Chevron’s oil refinery (1963) have set Pascagoula apart culturally and economically from the tourist and fishing-based communities on the Mississippi Coast.
East-west U.S. 90, completed as “Old Spanish Trail” in 1928, remains the primary artery through Pascagoula. The former Round Island Lighthouse, built in 1859, toppled in Hurricane Georges in 1998, was moved into the city after Hurricane Katrina, and now marks the western entrance to town.
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