Los Angeles the previous year charged with the mission of charting the route of the Old Spanish Trail Highway from the Pacific to the Atlantic. He had reached New Orleans the previous December and then skipped the New Orleans to Mobile region because of the destruction wrought by the 1915 Hurricane. He had gone on to Florida and was returning to the Coast to fill in the last link on his map.
The route he intended to take to New Orleans was not given. But unless he intended to sail, he would have had to have gone over the top of Lake Pontchartrain as Dr. Strong had done in 1910. Louisiana was working on the Gentilly-Chef Menleur road, but it was not complete.
The route by which Locke arrived in Ocean Springs was not given either, but if he drove from Mobile, he crossed the Pascagoula on a ferry far north of the town of Pascagoula. He certainly did not drive across the Pascagoula estuarine delta because no road yet existed, but it would soon.
On June 9, 1916, the supervisors of Jackson County districts three and four met and selected a site for a bridge across the West Pascagoula River. This bridge, to be located 375 feet north of and parallel to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad bridge, would connect to a road to be built by dredging a roadbed embankment in the marsh.
The West Pascagoula Bridge, because it crossed the shallower distributary of the river, could be of trestle type construction without a draw. However, only a drawbridge could be used on the navigable East Pascagoula which served as entry to ships loading at the Moss Point mills upstream. Since Jackson County could not afford such a draw' structure, then the bond issue which paid for the bridge and marsh embankment road also provided for the purchase of a “40 foot ferry', 20 feet wide, propelled by a gasoline engine” for use on the East Pascagoula.
The ferry would cross from the foot of Live Oak Street to a landing on the marsh road. In addition to the $50,000 in bonds sold to effect the aforementioned improvements, the county sold another $40,000 in bonds “for the purpose of building a road from the Alabama state line to the Harrison County line.”
In Harrison County the highway had evolved for 40 years. Though years would be required to complete it, Jackson County created the route to be followed by its link in the Old Spanish Trail Highway in one $90,000 bond issue.
Jackson County’s action in the east awakened Hancock County in the west. The Board of Supervisors there began to consider the possibility' of a two-mile-long bridge across the narrow neck of the Bay of St. Louis and using a ferry until it could be built. Hancock County also began to explore ways to meet the road coming to them from Louisiana.
On Monday July 3, 1916. ten months after the last big storm, a gang of convicts toiled at grading the beach road at Gulfport. More fortunate denizens of the Mississippi Gulf Coast prepared for the Glorious Fourth. Apparently the personnel of the New' Orleans Weather Bureau took off for the 4^ of July, too, because for the first time since 1893. the Coast received no warning of the thing that was coming.
A squall line swept over the Mississippi Coast on the morning of July 5, and hurricane-force winds struck at 2 p.m. Because the eye w'ent ashore just east of Ocean Springs, the
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