two-day trek to the north around the Bay of St. Louis “over a very bad road,” he paid six dollars for passage across the bay aboard the steamboat Oregon, which was making its regular run from New Orleans to Mobile. Driving his carriage off the steamboat onto the wharf at Pass Christian, he stayed there three days before proceeding along the Pass Road to Biloxi. In his diary Wailes wrote, “The road leaves the sea shore after passing the last houses of the Pass, traversing some hummock lands in which the live oak, magnolia, hickory, bay. . . and palmetto . . . are common growth . . . then entered the pine flats, a dreary uninhabited region.” After traveling 18 miles he turned right off Pass Road onto Courthouse Road, which led a mile south to Mississippi City, the site of the Harrison County Courthouse. After collecting some saltwater specimens in jars of alcohol, he retraced his path to Pass Road and continued eastward where he soon entered Handsboro. The smoothness of the sawdust-covered roadbed through that sawmill town impressed him. Leaving Handsboro, he once more entered level, open, pine country, before arriving at Biloxi after a 30-mile day’s journey. Leaving Biloxi and heading north, Wailes traveled for five days covering 101 miles before reaching the first settlement of any size—Williamsburg near present-day Collins.
As bad as the antebellum road connections were in Hancock and Harrison counties, at least the towns and hamlets had such a connection. In Jackson County the three-mile-wide estuarine delta of the Pascagoula River sundered any direct road connection between Ocean Springs and Gautier on the west and the town of Pascagoula on the east.
On the eve of the Civil War, the steamboat’s successor—the railroad—made its appearance in the Deep South. In the late 1850s, rails reached both Mobile and New Orleans from the north. The Confederate units formed in the Six Sisters did not march off to war. They boarded steamboats bound for New Orleans or Mobile and rode the northbound trains to the bloody battlefields of the upper South.
The Six Sisters, caught in a “no man’s land” between Yankee-held New Orleans and Confederate Mobile, languished until the end of the struggle. When the civilian refugees and the few soldier survivors returned to clear the weed-choked streets in 1865, the future seemed bleak indeed. Then in 1867 came the news that a New Orleans to Mobile railroad would be built. The lumber mills of the Coast revived as orders for crossties and bridge timbers poured in. Gangs of men, working simultaneously at many points along the line, built bridges across Chef Menteur Pass, the Rigolets, the Pearl River delta, the Bay of St. Louis, Biloxi Bay, and the Pascagoula estuary. Dredges threw up embankments through the swamps and marshes while more gangs of workers tracked from both ends of the line. On October 29, 1870, at 5 p.m., two trains, one from Mobile and the other from New Orleans, met near Chef Menteur Pass, 17 miles east of the latter city. Two representatives of the railroad drove a gold spike and a silver spike joining the final rails that united the Crescent City with the Gulf City. The next day the first excursion train traversed the 139-mile run between the two cities. Regular passenger and freight service officially began on November 21.
The Coast since colonial times had been connected to world shipping via the Ship Island anchorage, but the railroad connected the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the nation. Nearly all the
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