The ferry across the East Pascagoula River leaves the marsh road landing and heads east for the landing at the foot of Live Oak Street circa 1925. The ferry officially began operation on March 1, 1918. A gasoline engine powered the first ferry. Subsequent ferries serving this point were diesel powered. In September 1921, the Jackson County Board of Supervisors proposed to place a cable between the two landings so that the ferry would not be swept downstream by strong currents during high water. The cable is visible in the photograph and so is the framework of a large World War {-era ship abandoned on the ways in the Dierks-Blodgeti Shipbuilding Company yard north of the landing on the Pascagoula side. The unfinished ship burned on August 29,1927. so the photograph was made between lale 1921 and August 29, 1927. The ferry boat and its attached barges usually carried 16 automobiles, but in a pinch it could take 19 autos. The ferry' transported a record 1230 automobiles on July 4, 1927. It ceased operation with the opening of the East Pascagoula Bridge in August 1928.
Apparently the road to the Pascagoula Ferry was not well marked. On Saturday, November 19. 1921, four Harrison-Stone Agricultural High School “Aggie” football players-Louis and Steven Gorenflo, Nelson Douglas, and Eugene Coman-hired Wiggins taxi driver Guy Forbes to drive them to Pascagoula for a game. There the team iost the game by a score of 3-0. According to the Daily Herald, at 6:15 Saturday evening, enroute back to Perkinston, Forbes, "not knowing the roads, and intending to drive to the Ferry, miscalculated." Instead of turning from Delmas Avenue onto the ferry road, he drove to the docks. The five passenger Ford shot off the dock still clocking 25 miles per hour and splashed down in the middle of the Pascagoula River and settled to the bottom in 22 feet of very cold water. Two cars following closely on the Ford managed to stop in the nick of time. In the words of a Daily Herald reporter, "Not enjoying sitting in a car under water, the boys crawled out as best they could. Louis breaking through the isinglass at the back and Steve coming out from the side." When the boys emerged from the river shivering and wet. H. E. Fredericks of Pascagoula loaned clothes to two of them, and the Pascagoula High principal bought clothes for the other three. The Perkinston coach bought tickets, sending the Gorenflo boys to Biloxi and the other three to Gulfport. Bostick “Crab” Breland in an article entitled, ",Fording a River in a Ford," got in his licks on the incident. He quoted Forbes, then high and dry, as responding to his jibes with the reply, "You just can't keep a good man down." (The Harrison-Stone Agricultural High School of 1922 is in 2003 the Perkinston Campus of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.) Photo courtesy of the Jon Richard Lewis Postcard Collection.
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