Pleasure Island and the Making of Gulf Shores

Here is a fact that surprises many visitors. Gulf Shores sits on an island. In the nineteen thirties, engineers completed the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway through this stretch of coast, a protected inland canal that lets barges travel from Texas to Florida without ever facing the open Gulf.

That canal, finished around nineteen thirty seven, sliced the beach strip clean away from the mainland, turning it into a true island connected only by bridge. Former Governor Jim Folsom is credited with giving that new island a cheerful nickname, Pleasure Island, which the local Lions Club officially adopted in nineteen forty nine. For a long time this was a remote and thinly settled place, home to a small fishing community, its first post office opening only in nineteen forty seven.

The town of Gulf Shores finally incorporated in nineteen fifty eight, after a legal fight that went all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court, and back then it counted only around one hundred twenty residents. Today those same beaches draw millions of visitors a year and anchor a tourism economy worth billions, a resort city grown up on an island that a canal accidentally created.