Gulf Islands National Seashore: The Barrier Chain
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
Seven miles offshore from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, separated from the mainland by the shallow Mississippi Sound, lies a chain of narrow barrier islands that belong to the Gulf Islands National Seashore. The Mississippi unit of the park includes Horn Island, Petit Bois Island, East Ship Island, West Ship Island, and Cat Island. Together they form a crescent-shaped screen of sand and pine and sea grass between the open Gulf and the developed coast.
The islands move. That is the first thing to understand about them. Barrier islands are not fixed landforms. They migrate westward under the persistent push of longshore drift, accumulate and erode with each storm season, and periodically breach into separate islets during major hurricanes. Ship Island was one island until Hurricane Camille split it into two in nineteen sixty-nine. It has been East Ship Island and West Ship Island since that August night.
Horn Island is the largest and wildest of the Mississippi units, less than a mile wide at its widest and several miles long. It has no permanent human habitation. The interior is a mix of longleaf pine, live oak hammock, freshwater ponds, and Gulf beach. Brown pelicans, herons, terns, and shorebirds use the island in large numbers during migration. Loggerhead sea turtles nest on the beaches.
Fort Massachusetts, a large brick fortification built beginning in eighteen fifty-nine on West Ship Island, was used as a Union military prison during the Civil War. Confederate prisoners were held there. The structure survives largely intact and is accessible by ferry from Gulfport.
These islands were inhabited, seasonally or permanently, by indigenous people for thousands of years before European contact. French colonial expeditions used them as staging areas. The federal government began the process of preserving them in nineteen seventy-one. The national seashore now protects the islands from development, which makes them among the least developed barrier islands on the entire Gulf Coast.
