Ocean Springs: Where France First Planted Its Flag on the Gulf

The city you are approaching, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, sits on ground that carries the oldest European colonial history on the northern Gulf Coast. On April eighth, sixteen ninety-nine, French naval officer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville began construction of Fort Maurepas on a bluff overlooking Biloxi Bay, establishing the first permanent French settlement in what would become the state of Mississippi.

Iberville had been sent from France with a specific mission: find the mouth of the Mississippi River, which La Salle had claimed for France seventeen years earlier, and plant a fort to block the Spanish and English from moving in. He succeeded on both counts. Fort Maurepas was built, garrisoned, and supplied, giving France a foothold from which it would eventually expand to found Mobile in seventeen oh two and New Orleans in seventeen eighteen. The entire French colonial project in the lower Mississippi Valley radiated outward from this bluff.

The fort itself was abandoned after three years, when the French moved their base of operations east to a location that would become Mobile. But the settlement persisted, and the healing springs near the shore gave the town its eventual name. By the late nineteenth century, Ocean Springs had reinvented itself as a resort destination for the New Orleans elite, drawn by the springs and the cool breezes off the bay.

The artist Walter Anderson spent much of his life here, filling the walls of his cottage with murals painted alone through the night, a body of work that was discovered only after his death in nineteen sixty-five and is now considered one of the most remarkable achievements in American folk art.

Today Ocean Springs is known for its arts district and historic Main Street, but its deepest credential is those first pilings driven into Gulf Coast soil more than three centuries ago, at the very beginning of European Louisiana.