Seafood in Biloxi: The Industry, the Fleet and the Table

The factory system arrived in 1881 and changed the town within twenty years. Canning meant shrimp and oysters could leave Mississippi in a tin instead of a bucket of ice, which turned a local food into a national commodity and turned a small resort town into an industrial port with a seasonal labour problem.

The labour came from immigration. Factories recruited European families into the packing houses, housed them in rows close to the plants, and worked them through the winter oyster run and the summer shrimp run. Wages were piece rates, the floors were wet and cold, and the work went to whoever would take it, which regularly meant children. Hine's 1911 photographs from Biloxi are among the clearest surviving evidence of what that looked like: small pickers at the tables before dawn, hands wrapped against oyster shell.

Almost none of the physical industry survives. The plants were replaced, bypassed and finally flattened, and the 2005 surge took most of what was left along the Back Bay. What remains is the layout of the neighbourhoods, a handful of family names on boats and restaurants, and the collection at the Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum at Point Cadet, which was itself destroyed in Katrina and reopened in a new three-storey building in August 2014.

Before engines, the Mississippi Sound was worked under sail by a boat designed for it. The Biloxi schooner was two-masted, broad and shallow enough to float over oyster reefs in a few feet of water, and strong enough to drag a dredge across them. A fleet of them ran the catch to the factory docks on the tide, which is why the canneries clustered where the water was deep enough to come alongside and shallow enough to be reached.

Engines ended them within a generation. A motor boat works a reef regardless of wind, holds a schedule, and does not need a crew who can sail. By the middle of the twentieth century the working schooners were gone, and the type survived mainly in photographs and in the name.

Two replicas sail today from the Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum's pier at Point Cadet, the Glenn L. Swetman and the Mike Sekul, built to the old lines and used for public sails and school programmes. Sailings depend on weather, crew and season rather than on a fixed timetable, so treat a schooner sail as something to enquire about when you arrive rather than something to promise a child in advance. Seeing one under way on the Sound is the single best explanation of this city anybody has managed.

When Vietnamese refugee families reached the Mississippi coast from the late 1970s, the seafood plants had vacancies that were hard to fill, and the work was available to people without English or local connections. Within a few years the pattern moved from wage work to ownership: families pooled money, bought older hulls, repaired them and fished them, often with crews drawn from the same extended family.

By the end of the 1980s a large share of Mississippi's shrimping fleet was Vietnamese-American, and the change was not always welcomed. Competition for licences, dock space and a shrinking resource produced real hostility on this coast and elsewhere on the Gulf in that period. That history is documented and it is part of why the fleet's current shape is worth explaining rather than glossing.

For a visitor, the visible results are in three places. The boats at the Small Craft Harbor and along the Back Bay carry the names. The Blessing of the Fleet, a tradition that appears to have started in Biloxi in 1929, now blesses a fleet the founders would not have recognised. And the food is here: pho and banh mi on the coast, Gulf shrimp cooked in ways that arrived in the 1970s, and grocery shelves that serve a community rather than a tourist market. Eat at both kinds of place in one trip and you will have understood more about Biloxi than any museum can tell you.