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FINDING FOOD AT BILOXI
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FOR CIVILIAN FAMILIES D'TRING THE WAT?
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Source; Captain Esse Ernest Desporte in "Legends of Biloxi I Remember?'
Miss, coast Historical % Genealogical Society Volume No. 6 - February 1972
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When the Civil War took practically all our able-bodied men away, we were glad to obtain the fresh foodstuffs which our Indian neighbors brought.	In return we gave them salt.
On the beach,	for a block or so in front	of	our	home, we
boiled sea water and made salt. The water about Biloxi is very dense with salt. At that time we could obtain anything we wanted in exchange for salt. Farmers needed it so badly that they dug up the floors of their smokehouses and boiled the earth to extract salt from it, so that they were glad to exchange corn and potatoes for our salt.
Biloxi?s mild	climate and seafood helped	us	during those	trying
days and my Father	sometimes ran the blockade	in	his	boat and	brought
provisions from New Orleans. On one such trip he was captured and imprisoned on Ship Island.
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(Ernest Desporte, born in I88S, told M-JS i Feb. 26, 1972, that his father escaped with another man from Ship Island in a skiff provided b^y a negroe who knew him and was a guard on the island. Desporte made his way to Mobile, served on the c.S. Selma during the Mobile Bay battle with Farragut?s union fleet, ana was again captured.)
News travels fast by word of mouth. One day we heard that a barge load of corn and potatoes had arrived in Handsboro, nine or, ten miles to the westward. My Mother and Aunt and other women walked all those miles and each brought horn.a half bushel of corn on her shoulders. Their children must be fed.
One of the luxuries lost to us'by the war was coffee. But we had not lost our taste for it, and women provided their families with a substitute for coffee by parching and grinding acorns and sweet potatoes. We had no sugar so we sweetened our coffee with molasses.
All Biloxi boys owned skiffs and castnets so that we were always well supplied with seafood.