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The famous Barnes Hotel of Mississippi City where John L. Sullivan knocked out Paddy Ryan, February 7, 1882, for the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The fight was originally scheduled for New Orleans but was transferred upon a tip off of a raid. The site of the hotel was between Texas and Arkansas Streets facing the Gulf before Highway 90 existed.
Historic Ante Helium Motel
THREE decades before the Civil War it was the custom of the well-to-do Deep South sugar and cotton planters to take their families north for the summer. In the late 1830s it was estimated that 50,000 persons from the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina were annual summer guests at the northern resorts or watering places of Saratoga, Ballston, Nahant, Long Branch, Nantucket and Niagara—spending an average of $500 per person.
At that time there was no concerted Southern movement to stop or reverse that travel trend. Even the Deep South newspapers seemed to accept this summer surge northward as normal. The New Orleans Daily Picayune even published the names of prominent Southerners registered each season at Niagara. The Mississippi shore of the Gulf of Mexico had not yet received sufficient recognition as a Southern summer resort. Its Mississippi City did not yet exist (established in 1837) and Ocean Springs was still known as Old Biloxi, not named Ocean Springs until 1855.
But gradually the Mississippi Coast— free of the summer Yellow Fever threat that almost annually plagued New Orleans and air-conditioned by the cooling saltwater breeze off the Gulf of Mexico —bccame the summer sanctuary for the heat fleeing, health seeking New Orleanians and upriver planters. By the
early 1850s the respected and influential DeBows Review took up the cause of the Coast and editorially urged its readers to enjoy the Deep South’s own saltwater summer resort instead of going north, a policy that found support in the growing hostility between the North and the South. In 1852 it was recorded that 20,000 summer guests had visited the Six Sister Cities by the Sea— Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Mississippi City, Biloxi, Ocean Springs and Pascagoula. By the late 1850’s the Mississippi Gulf Coast had become the Deep South’s most popular saltwater summer resort.
Those antebellum guests frequently came in entire family groups together with personal slaves, riding horses and even a carriage. They arrived in the coastwise steamboats that plied between New Orleans and Mobile and which made daily stops at all the Coast communities. Those guests stayed anywhere from a week to the entire summer season from May to September.
The hotels combined both room and meals in what we call today the American Plan. Rates were fairly standard, those of the popular Bay St. Louis Hotel being representative: $35 per month; $10 per week; $2 per day; children and servants half price. The standard transient rate was $2 per day.
The recreation provided by most of the antebellum hotels of the Coast con-
sisted of fishing, sailing, swimming and bathing, shooting, riding, romantic walks, archery, billiards, ten pins and dancing. Serving good food and excellent drinks was coastwise standard procedure.
The Saturday Night Dance was the high spot of the hotels’ arranged entertainment. In those days young ladies did not travel alone or in groups. They came with their families, were properly chaperoned and the Saturday Night Dances were usually their most favorable opportunities to meet marriageable young men.
The young men, however, did travel alone and in groups. In fact many of them took rooms at the hotels, called Bachelor Quarters, for the sole purpose of meeting the nubile young ladies among the guests. Many young gallants repeatedly made the 5-hour steamboat trip from New Orleans on Saturday to attend the dance that night and returned to town Sunday.
Those hotel dances were remarkably successful in promoting romances as indicated by the record of the Pass Christian Hotel for the social season of 1849. Four engagements were formally announced which culminated in marriage. The most notable being that of Dick Taylor, son of the president of the United States, who convalescing in a wheel chair met and wooed Miss Myrtle Bringier.