Fort Maurepas and the First Capital of French Louisiana
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
Somewhere beneath the lawns of what is now Ocean Springs, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, lies the footprint of Fort Maurepas. It was built in the spring of sixteen ninety-nine, and for a brief, strange moment, it was the capital of French Louisiana, the administrative heart of an empire that claimed everything from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville had sailed from France with two frigates and roughly two hundred settlers and soldiers. He had been charged by Louis the Fourteenth with establishing a permanent French presence at the mouth of the Mississippi River before Spain or England did. He found the Mississippi's mouth first, proved that it connected to La Salle's earlier inland explorations, then sailed back east looking for a site easier to supply and defend. The shallow coastal waters near the Biloxi tribe's homeland suited him. The Biloxi people, whose language was Siouan and whose territory stretched along this stretch of coast, had already made contact with the French.
Iberville chose a spot on the east bank of Biloxi Bay and began construction in April of sixteen ninety-nine. The fort was small by European standards: a wooden palisade, a handful of structures, a warehouse for trade goods. His younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was left as second in command under Sauvolle when Iberville returned to France. Bienville was nineteen years old.
The colony struggled almost immediately. The soil around Old Biloxi, as the site is sometimes called, was sandy and thin. Growing food was difficult. Supply ships from France were irregular. The settlers fell ill. Yellow fever and other diseases cut through the population in waves that the historical record documents but does not always enumerate precisely.
Mobile replaced Fort Maurepas as the colonial capital in seventeen oh two. New Orleans eventually supplanted Mobile. The colonial center of gravity moved west, and the site that had briefly been the nerve center of a continental ambition went back to pine forest and marsh.
The town of Ocean Springs grew up around the old fort site. A historical marker stands there today. The precise footprint of the fort has not been fully excavated. What survives in the ground remains largely unexamined.
