Museums and History in Biloxi

George Ohr threw pots nobody wanted. He worked in Biloxi from the 1880s, made vessels with walls as thin as paper, then crushed, folded and twisted them while the clay was still soft, glazed them in colours that had no business on Gulf Coast pottery, and signed himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi. Local buyers wanted a jug. Ohr kept most of his output, crated it, and told people it would be valued after he was gone. He died in 1918 and the crates sat for half a century until dealers and collectors found them and the reappraisal began.

The museum that resulted was established in 1989 and commissioned Frank Gehry to design its campus, five buildings arranged around the live oaks on a site by the beach road. Construction was under way in August 2005 when the storm pushed a casino barge ashore into it. The rebuilt campus opened in stages: three buildings in November 2010, including the Gallery of African American Art and the Mississippi Sound Welcome Center, and the City of Biloxi Center for Ceramics in September 2012.

Go even if ceramics leave you cold. The stainless pods bending around the oaks are the most interesting architecture on the Mississippi coast, and seeing Ohr's crumpled, iridescent vessels in a building that also refuses to sit up straight is the closest this city comes to making an argument about itself.

The Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum opened in 1986, lost its building to the surge in 2005, and reopened in August 2014 in a purpose-built three-storey block at Point Cadet, at the eastern tip of the peninsula where the factory neighbourhood used to be.

Inside is the working history that the rest of the coast has largely demolished: net-making and marine blacksmithing, wooden boat building, oyster dredges, the catboat and the Biloxi skiff, the cannery floor, hurricanes, and the arrival of the Vietnamese-American fleet. It is a museum about labour rather than about scenery, and it is specific enough that people who grew up on this coast bring visiting relatives to it.

The two replica Biloxi schooners tie up at the museum's pier: the Glenn L. Swetman and the Mike Sekul, built to the lines of the two-masted boats that dredged oysters under sail before engines took over. Public sails and school programmes run from here, weather and crew permitting, and the museum runs a summer camp for children that puts them on the water rather than in a classroom.

Allow an hour and a half inside, more if anyone in the party has ever worked on a boat. Check the schedule before travelling for a sail, because sailing days are not a fixed timetable.

Beauvoir is a raised Gulf Coast cottage on the beach road, built in 1848 and finished in 1852, and it is best known as the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Davis arrived in 1877 as the guest of the writer Sarah Dorsey, bought the property in 1879, and completed The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government there in 1881. He died in 1889.

What happened next matters as much as the Davis years. Varina Davis sold the estate in 1902 to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and from 1903 to 1957 it operated as a home for ageing Confederate veterans and their widows, housing roughly two and a half thousand people over fifty-four years. A cemetery on the grounds holds many of them. The Mississippi Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, still owns and operates the site, which is a National Historic Landmark. The house reopened on 3 June 2008 after Katrina damage, and the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library followed in June 2013.

Read it with that ownership in mind. Interpretation at Confederate memorial sites is contested, and the framing you encounter here reflects an organisation founded to commemorate the Confederacy rather than a National Park Service or university history programme. The house, the grounds and the veterans' home story are genuinely significant; the account of why the war happened is the part historians argue about. Going is defensible. Going without knowing what you are reading is not.

The cast-iron tower marooned in the median of US 90 was first lit in 1848 and stands 61 feet, which is small for a lighthouse and enormous for a traffic island. It is the emblem on the city's own literature for good reason: it survived the 1969 and 2005 storms that removed most of what stood around it.

Its keepers are the better story. Mary Reynolds was appointed in 1854 and held the light through the opening of the Civil War. Maria Younghans took over in December 1867 and kept it until the last day of 1918, fifty-one years, and her daughter Miranda continued to 1929. One family, sixty-three consecutive years, two women running an aid to navigation in a century that rarely let them run anything.

The tale you will hear locally is that the tower was painted black in mourning for Abraham Lincoln. It is a good story and the dates do not support it: the tower was coated in coal tar in 1866, which is what you did to cast iron on a salt coast to stop it rusting. Say so gently if you are on a tour.

Katrina damaged the structure badly, particularly the brick lining inside, and restoration was completed on 19 February 2010 at a cost above four hundred thousand dollars. The city owns it and has opened it for short climbs on a limited schedule. Ask across the road at the visitors centre rather than turning up expecting a door to be open.

Katrina is not a museum subject here. It is within living memory of almost every adult you will meet, and it killed people on this shoreline, so the way to approach it is as recent local history rather than as a spectacle.

The formal memorial stands on the Town Green downtown and carries 170 names. It is a short walk from the lighthouse and the visitors centre, and it takes about ten minutes to read properly. Nearby, high-water marks and interpretive plaques record how far up the buildings the surge reached; on this coast the figures are hard to believe standing in the sun on a calm day.

The absences are the other half of the record. Antebellum houses that lined the beach road were destroyed in 2005, among them the Tullis-Toledano Manor, and were not rebuilt; several of those sites are open lawn with a marker. The gaps between buildings along US 90 are not planning failures, they are what is left after the surge and the insurance.

If you want the fuller account, the seafood museum covers the storm as part of the coast's hurricane history, and the visitors centre staff will talk about it. Almost everyone here will, if you ask respectfully and then listen. Photographing a memorial is fine. Treating a neighbourhood's worst day as a backdrop is not.

Cross the bay bridge and the coast's art history is waiting in a town you can park once and walk. Walter Anderson, who lived from 1903 to 1965, painted the Gulf's plants, birds and water with an intensity that his own family found difficult, and rowed a skiff out to Horn Island alone for weeks at a time to work.

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art was dedicated on 4 May 1991 and holds the Little Room, the small space he covered in murals and kept locked, which was only discovered after his death and has been installed inside the museum. Next door, the community centre carries about three thousand square feet of his murals, painted for a fee so small it became a local legend.

Shearwater Pottery, founded in 1928 by his brother Peter, still operates in the family compound nearby, and the Anderson family still makes and decorates there. The 2005 surge did severe damage to the compound and to the family's holdings, and what you see has been rebuilt.

Give Ocean Springs a half day rather than an hour. The museum takes ninety minutes, the pottery another thirty, and the walkable downtown is the best lunch on the Mississippi coast. This is the single easiest high-quality half day in reach of a Biloxi hotel room.