The Gold Coast's Antebellum Houses and the Summer Colony
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
Before the casinos, before the canneries, before the hurricanes remade the shoreline, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a name that spoke to its antebellum ambition. They called it the Gold Coast.
The Gold Coast referred to the stretch of Highway Ninety between Biloxi and Pass Christian, where, in the decades before the Civil War and then again in the prosperous years following Reconstruction, wealthy New Orleans families built summer cottages along the beach. The Gulf breeze and the relative elevation above sea level made this coast measurably cooler in summer than New Orleans, which sat in a bowl of heat and yellow fever. The journey by coastal steamer from New Orleans took only a few hours.
The houses that lined the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not modest. They were the substantial summer villas of the Louisiana planter and merchant class: wide galleries wrapping two or three sides, high ceilings to catch the breeze, deep porches shaded with live oaks. Some were permanent residences of old Creole families who had been on the coast since the French colonial period. Others were summer retreats, occupied for a few months and shuttered in October.
The railroads that reached the coast extended the resort potential by making the coast accessible to a middle class that could not afford private steamers. Gulfport, when Hardy founded it in eighteen eighty-seven, was planned partly as a resort destination as well as a port. Hotels went up along the beach. The summer colony that had been an elite preserve became, over the course of a generation, something more broadly accessible.
Hurricane Camille in nineteen sixty-nine destroyed or severely damaged many of the antebellum houses that had survived to that point. Katrina destroyed more. What remains is scattered: a few survivors on side streets inland, documented in photographs in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which has assembled an extensive record of what the Gold Coast looked like before the storms took it.
