Early in the twentieth century Biloxi had the greatest seafood-packing capacity in the world, with twelve big canneries shipping more than fifteen million cans of oysters a year. The Biloxi schooner built that economy. A hurricane in 1893 wrecked most of the fishing fleet, and fishermen replaced catboats with broad, shallow, three-sailed schooners built of Louisiana cypress and Mississippi longleaf pine. They ran for about four decades, until motors took over and the last known schooner was wrecked by Hurricane Elena in 1985. The museum, founded in 1986, built two replicas, the Glenn L. Swetman and the Mike Sekul, and brought back the schooner race.
The labor story is here too. Shrimpers organized with the International Longshoremen's Association in 1915, and packers who controlled the boats refused to bargain. A strike in 1932 won union recognition, but a 1955 court found the union in violation of antitrust law, fined it and outlawed it, and its officers were sentenced to jail. In 1977 a packer shuttled Vietnamese laborers to Biloxi to shuck oysters, and by 1989 about half of Mississippi's shrimpers were Vietnamese, many of them settling in East Biloxi's Point Cadet and Back Bay.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the museum in August 2005. A new three-story building opened on Point Cadet on August 2, 2014. Exhibits cover shrimping, oystering, boat building and net-making, and a hurricane museum, the Wade Guice, is inside the building.
The closest stops worth working into your route