The Old Place

Fernando Gautier was born in 1822 on a cargo ship carrying his parents to New Orleans. In 1867 he settled at the mouth of the Pascagoula River and made the homestead known as the Old Place, where he lived with his wife, Theresa Fayard Gautier, who was born in 1828 and died in 1911. His sawmill business was profitable enough that a settlement grew around it and took the family name. He died in 1891. The house is still associated with his descendants and is used for private and public events.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Round Island Lighthouse at Lighthouse Park — 3.2 mi
  What survives of the 1832 Round Island light, moved to the foot of the Pascagoula River bridge, with a free walking pathway through nine eras of Pascagoula history.
• LaPointe-Krebs House (Old Spanish Fort) — 3.2 mi
  The oldest standing structure in Mississippi, a French colonial plantation house in Pascagoula, set on land where Pascagoula and Biloxi peoples lived before the colonists came.
• Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge — 5.4 mi
  A refuge for one of the rarest birds in North America and the wet pine savanna it needs, created in 1975 as the first refuge established under the Endangered Species Act.
• Walter Anderson Museum of Art — 13 mi
  A museum in downtown Ocean Springs built around the artist who rowed to Horn Island to paint, with his 1952 murals of Iberville's 1699 landing and the Seven Climates of the town.

More markers nearby

• Gautier School — 0.3 mi
• Eric Clark Coastal Preserve — 3.2 mi
• Pascagoula Street Railroad and Power Company — 3.6 mi
• Graveline — 4.0 mi