The History of Biloxi, and Where to See It

For a city of fifty thousand people, Biloxi carries an unreasonable amount of history, and most of it is uncomfortable in one way or another. A French colonial landing. A resort coast for antebellum planters. A cannery boom built on immigrant and, for a while, child labour. The last home of the president of the Confederacy. A gaming industry legalised in 1990. And a storm that removed the waterfront in 2005.

The museums here are unusually good at the parts that are about work and water, and one significant site is not a museum in the ordinary sense at all. This page sorts them out.

Start with the geography of the founding

A small correction that changes how the coast reads. The French expedition under Iberville that founded this settlement in 1699 built its fort across the bay, at what is now Ocean Springs. The colony later moved to the peninsula that is Biloxi today. So when you cross the Biloxi Bay Bridge for dinner in Ocean Springs, you are crossing to the older site, and the two towns have been arguing about it amiably ever since.

The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art

The best building on the Mississippi coast, built for a man his neighbours thought was a crank.

George Ohr, who lived from 1857 to 1918, called himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi and worked from a pottery in the middle of town, throwing vessels with walls as thin as paper and then crumpling, folding and twisting them while the clay was still wet. Almost nobody bought them. He put thousands into storage, convinced that a later century would understand, and he was right: the work resurfaced decades after his death and Ohr is now placed among the most original American potters of his era.

Frank Gehry designed the campus that holds it, a group of stainless-steel pods arranged among the live oaks on a four-acre site by the beach road. The first buildings opened on 8 November 2010, with a ceramics centre following in 2012. The delay has its own reason: in August 2005 a casino barge was driven off its moorings and onto the part-built site.

The campus also holds the Pleasant Reed Interpretive Center, telling the story of a formerly enslaved carpenter who built his family a house in Biloxi in the 1880s. The structure on the campus is a reconstruction; the original did not survive the storm.

Go for the building even if ceramics leave you cold. An hour is enough, two if the galleries have something on.

The Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum

If you only do one museum here, do this one. It is the story of what this city was for.

Founded in 1986, destroyed by Katrina in 2005 and reopened on 2 August 2014 in a purpose-built three-storey building at Point Cadet, it covers shrimping, oystering, net-making, boat-building, the canneries and the schooner fleet, and it does so without romance. Inside it is the Wade Guice Hurricane Museum, which is the most useful explanation of this coast's storm history you will find anywhere.

The museum also operates the two replica Biloxi schooners, the Glenn L. Swetman and the Mike Sekul, from the Schooner Pier Complex. When they sail, they are the best two hours available in this city: shallow-draft, two-masted working boats of the kind that dredged these reefs under sail before engines arrived, crewed by people who will hand you a line.

The Biloxi Lighthouse

Cast iron, first lit in 1848, a little over sixty feet, standing in the median of US 90 with four lanes of traffic going past on both sides. It is the city's emblem and it is genuinely odd to stand next to.

Two things make it more than a photograph. The first is that it was kept by women for longer than any other lighthouse in the United States: Mary Reynolds took it on in 1854, and Maria Younghans and her daughter Miranda between them kept the light for around sixty-three years. The second is a myth worth killing. The tower was coated in coal tar in 1866, and the story that it was painted black to mourn Abraham Lincoln is not true: it was rust protection.

It came through Katrina, was restored, and was relit in February 2010. The city has at times offered climbing tours; ask at the visitors centre rather than turning up expecting one.

Beauvoir, and what you should know before you go

Beauvoir is the house where Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States, lived from 1877 until his death in 1889, and where he wrote his account of the Confederacy. The house was built between 1848 and 1852 for a planter named James Brown, a raised Gulf Coast cottage designed for heat and storm. Varina Davis sold it in 1902 to the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans on condition that it serve as a home for Confederate veterans and a memorial, and a veterans' home did operate on the grounds for decades. The organisation still owns and runs the site. There is a cemetery on the property, including a Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier, and a Jefferson Davis Presidential Library.

Katrina destroyed five of the seven major buildings here and roughly forty per cent of the library's collection. The main house reopened on 3 June 2008 and the library in 2013.

What to know before you go

Now the part a guide should say plainly. This is a memorial site operated by a Confederate heritage organisation, not a National Park Service property, and the interpretation offered there has been reported and criticised as a Lost Cause account, one that minimises slavery's centrality to the Civil War. Historians dispute that framing comprehensively.

None of that is a reason to pretend the place is not here. It is one of the most visited historic sites on this coast, it is a genuine piece of nineteenth-century Gulf architecture, and understanding how the Confederacy is memorialised in the present day is a legitimate reason to visit. Go if that interests you, go knowing who is telling you the story, and read something independent about Davis and about slavery in Mississippi either side of the visit. The main house is reached by a broad exterior stair, so settle accessibility questions before you drive over.

Across the bay: Walter Anderson

Fifteen minutes east in Ocean Springs is the other essential art museum on this coast. Walter Inglis Anderson, who lived from 1903 to 1965, rowed a small boat alone out to Horn Island for weeks at a time to draw and paint what lived there, and painted a cottage room at his home in Ocean Springs that nobody saw until after he died. That room, the Little Room, is at the museum, which was dedicated in May 1991. His largest public work, the murals in the Ocean Springs Community Center, is part of the same complex.

It is an hour, it is beside the best walking street on the coast, and it is the single most surprising thing many visitors do here.

Check opening days before you set out. Several of these close one or two days a week and the pattern changes with the season, so a phone call or the institution's own page beats any list, including this one.