roads until they reached Burnside on River Road connecting Baton Rouge with New Orleans. They arrived in New Orleans 38 hours after leaving Pass Christian. New Orleans lay 58 miles west of Pass Christian by rail. By road the city was 225 miles away.
Interest in a New Orleans to Mobile Highway reached a fever pitch along the Coast with the arrival of U. S. Government Engineer B. F. Hydell in July 1914. Harrison County officials conducted Hydell along the front beach road on an inspection tour. The month after Hydell’s tour, U. S. Government Engineer James C. Wonders arrived on the Coast to survey the proposed Harrison County link in the new highway. He completed his survey at the end of the first week in September.
On November 23, 1914. the Daily Herald touted the coming New Orleans to Mobile Highway as a link in a proposed transcontinental highway from San Francisco eastward. Through contacts with good roads enthusiasts in St. Tammany Parish and in New Orleans, the paper reported that Louisianians proposed to connect New Orleans to the Mississippi Gulf Coast via a road leading from Gentilly Boulevard in New Orleans to Chef Menteur and the Rigolets touching the Mississippi line at Pearlington. Such an undertaking would require throwing up a roadbed embankment in the marshes by dredging a 30-foot-wide eight-foot-deep canal in the necessary' places. Drawbridges would have to be built at Chef Menteur and the Rigolets.
On July 1. 1915. Harrison County work crews began moving fences back along the beachfront at Mississippi City in accordance with the government survey drawn by Engineer Wonders the previous fall. In the ensuing months work crews began regrading the front beach road to the specifications set by Wonders’s survey.
On September 28, 1915, prominent Mississippi good roads advocates joined other like-minded boosters from Louisiana and Alabama in Mobile to organize the Alabama-Gulf Coast Highway Association. This association was founded for one purpose. The members wished to ensure that the route of the recently proposed “Jackson Highway” envisioned to run from Buffalo, New York, to New Orleans passed through Mobile and crossed the Mississippi Gulf Coast cnroute to the Crescent City-.
The next day the Hurricane of 1915 destroyed the railroad bridge at the Rigolets and bent the draw on the Bay St. Louis railroad bridge. The storm stripped the Harrison County coastline of wharves and bathhouses, destroyed the trolley line, and piled the detritus of all that together with numerous boats on the washed out front beach road. Oddly enough Harrison County Engineer J. G. Galloway claimed that the storm did more good than harm to the road in that it graded some sections of the beach road to the desired level. In any case the Hurricane of 1915 at last awakened the Coast to the need for a seawall.
A large group of citizens gathered at the courthouse in Gulfport on October 4 and petitioned the Board of Supervisors to issue bonds for the construction of a modem permanent highway north and south and east and west through the county with the latter being protected by a seawall. The following night a similar gathering of citizens in Biloxi seconded the motion.
The Associated Press, in its coverage of the Hurricane of 1915, did more damage to the
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