US 90 on the Gulf Coast: Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula
About 50 miles of US 90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, from Bay St. Louis through Biloxi and Ocean Springs to the Round Island Lighthouse in Pascagoula.
The Route at a Glance
US 90 follows the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and early in the twentieth century it was part of the Old Spanish Trail. This drive takes 50 miles of it, about an hour and twenty minutes without stops, from Bay St. Louis east through Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi and Ocean Springs to Pascagoula. The Mississippi Gulf Coast covers the country. When French ships anchored off the coast in 1699, the Pascagoula, Biloxi and Capinan peoples already had towns along the Pascagoula River. Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 destroyed the Bay St. Louis Bridge and the Biloxi Bay Bridge, and the Bay St. Louis Bridge was completed in its new form on January 4, 2008. The storm also destroyed the Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum and flooded the LaPointe-Krebs House, and both have been rebuilt.
Ship Island and Fort Massachusetts lie twelve miles offshore and are reached by a seasonal ferry from Gulfport. Confederate troops burned the unfinished fort in September 1861, and the Union used the island as a staging ground and a prison camp that held more than 4,200 Confederate prisoners by the war's end. In January 1863 the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard, a regiment of Black soldiers, arrived for garrison duty, and Gulfport native Natasha Trethewey wrote her poem "Elegy for the Native Guards" about them.
Biloxi holds the road's civil rights stop. Harrison County's twenty-six-mile beach was restored with federal money and maintained with county equipment, and Black residents were still kept off it. The Biloxi Lighthouse, cast iron and lit in 1848, was the only operating lighthouse on the Mississippi coast after Katrina; Maria Younghans took charge of it in 1867 after her husband, the appointed keeper, died, and her family kept the light for sixty-three years. In the beach lot beside it, the Biloxi Beach Wade-In Marker recalls May 14, 1959, when Dr. Gilbert Mason walked into the Gulf with neighbors and his young son and police ordered them out. On April 24, 1960, more than a hundred Black residents walked from Biloxi's Back-of-Town to the beach, and a white mob attacked them while police watched. At least thirteen people were injured and no one in the mob was charged. The beaches opened to all in 1968.
The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art holds the paper-thin pots of George Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter of Biloxi, in Frank Gehry's pavilions, and the campus includes a replica of the house Pleasant Reed, born enslaved in 1854, built in 1887. The Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum on Point Cadet tells of the schooners, the 1932 shrimpers' strike and the Vietnamese families who by 1989 made up about half of Mississippi's shrimpers. In Ocean Springs the Walter Anderson Museum of Art keeps the murals he painted in 1952, among them Iberville's 1699 landing.
The road ends in Pascagoula. The LaPointe-Krebs House, which the state archives call the oldest standing structure in Mississippi, stands on land where Pascagoula and Biloxi peoples lived. Joseph Simon de la Pointe received a land concession here about 1718 and had a working plantation within a decade, using enslaved labor, and a 1745 census recorded ten European colonists and sixty enslaved Africans in the area. The drive ends at the Round Island Lighthouse, moved to the foot of the Pascagoula River bridge in 2010 after Georges and Katrina left about a third of it standing.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
8 stops along the route, in driving order from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi to Round Island Lighthouse, Pascagoula, Mississippi. One of them sits off the road itself — the distance is noted on each.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let US 90 on the Gulf Coast: Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula do what it does best.
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