The Chronicle-star combined with the Moss Point advertiser., 1946-02-01

| must have been to be the first
to reach Ship Island, where they
made their headquarters. The
surf pounding on the white sand.
as it had for all eternity, through
all the centuries of Europe's his
tory, through the Middle Ages
and long before, when no white
man had ever looked upon it.
Gulls and pelieans Tapping in the
wind, busy with their fishing,
and as unconcerned about the
first white man as they will prob
ably be about the last. The green
pine trees, the mystery of this
virginia. and UNEMPLOYED island.
And from there they could look
toward the mainland, the thin
| green line of coast, and sense the
University of the vast dark"
continent stretching away toward
the north, a continent of endless
promise, adventure, toll, tragedy
and achievement-that would
take them and their descendants
many centuries to develop.
That was in the year 1899.
Later a settlement was made on
the site of the old Spanish Fort
on what we know now as Krebs
lake. Other settlements were
made in Mobile bay, on the Bluffs
that are now Ocean Springs. and
twenty years later, about 1719,
they went down to the mouth of
the river and travelled about a
hundred miles upstream to found
New Orleans. The land then was
just an uncharted spot of cypress
| grown swamp between the river
and the unnamed lake.
All of this coastal countryside
presented to them exactly the
same basic appearance that il
does to us, except for the high
ways. bridges, houses and other
marks and accumulations of civil
ization. Perhaps there are even
great live-oaks on the bluffs and
in the swamps that were seen by
! these first men as little saplings.
! Pascagoula river. the marshes,
the pines, the beaches, were the
same for them as they are for
us-except that the first men saw
unspolled long-leaf pine forests
which no longer exist in our
time.
Think what an adventure ii
must have been for some
Frenchman from Paris. grown
up in the cobbled streets of a
dirty. crowded European city
scarcely emerged from the
Dark Ages. to roam the scent
ed and cathedral-l like forests
of pine jufting out into the
sparkling Gulf.
Ducks and geese by the mil
lions migrated down each win
term numbers that no white
man now alive can remember
and they covered the lagoons
and marshes. The Frenchmen
must have hunted them with
their crude firearms, and they
must have fished for the spec
les and the reds. and the
green trout" and brim in the
rivers just as we do.
There no seaWalls then,
only endless miles of sand
beaches, strewn with whitening
drift wood, and here and there
the half buried trunk of some
tremendous tree blown over in
a storm. Many of us still re-
member when the beaches were
like that. II was not so long
ago. The great forests of oaks
and pines had already gone in our
time. in most places, but the
beaches were much as they had
been when the first French set
tiers arrived.
The seawalls were necessary,
of course, otherwise there could
have been no roads, and eventu-
ally this coast, which was crum-
bling, would have toppled all the
beach houses into the sound.
But many of us miss the old
beaches as we remember them,
with those huge whitened tree
trunks that made the best benches
in the world, and an endless
source of adventure and magma
ton for children at their PLAY. We
can look at our old photographs
in the albums against these back
grounds. and recall that old salty
tide-water' smell OF the coast
that seems to have diminished
with the coming of the seawalls.
| wonder how many of the old
timers here in Pascagoula are
of the same opinion as we are,
that before the sea-walls. and in
the days when some of the pine
forests were still left, the Coast
had a balmy air of salt and wind
and pine woods that seems to be
passing with the years.
Families driving over from New
Orleans (almost an imposSibilltv