LaPointe-Krebs House (Old Spanish Fort)

When French ships anchored off the Mississippi coast in 1699, the Pascagoula, Biloxi and Capinan peoples already had towns along the Pascagoula River. The Pascagoula spoke a Choctawan language and the Biloxi a Siouan one. By 1700 Iberville found a Biloxi village deserted, the nation thinned by disease, and in 1763 the Pascagoula and other small coastal nations moved west into Spanish Louisiana. Excavations on this small park have turned up Native pottery, much of it attributed to the Pascagoula and the Choctaw, alongside the colonial record.

About 1718 Joseph Simon de la Pointe received a land concession here and, with enslaved labor, had a working plantation within a decade. His daughter Marie Josephine married Hugo Krebs in 1741, and the Krebs family held the property until 1940. A 1745 census recorded ten European colonists and sixty enslaved Africans in the area. The house is a French colonial-style building that the archaeology dates to the 1770s, standing over the remains of an earlier French structure. The state archives call it the oldest standing structure in Mississippi.

The place was listed on the National Register in 1971 as "Old Spanish Fort," and the foundation that runs it now says the house was formerly known by that name. Hurricane Katrina flooded the house and museum in August 2005, and FEMA-funded restoration through the state archives and new excavations in 2010 turned up 96 features in the ground. It is a short stop, and the Lighthouse Park walk on the river is close by.