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Hancock Bank returns to Pearlington
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The original Hancock Bank in Pearlington.
FILE PHOTO
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By EDITH BIERHORST BACK
HANCOCK COUNTY BUREAU CHIEF
PEARLINGTON — The southwest corner of Hancock County, with its thriving lumber industry, was the logical place for the first branch office of the infant Hancock Bank, established in Bay St. Louis in 1899.
Earlier this month, nearly a half-century after its departure, Hancock Bank returned to the area. Its 32nd branch was opened in Pearlington on Mississippi 604, which runs from U.S. 90 through the heart of this community of 2,000 to Mississippi 607.
When the first Pearlington branch was opened in 1902, bank officers from the Bay traveled by rail as far as English Lookout, boarded a boat from there to Logtown, and finished the voyage to Pearlington in a horse-drawn coach. For this month’s opening, Hancock Bank notables traveled the 22-
mile distance in short order along U.S. 90.
And most of the transactions at the reborn Pearlington branch, which occupies one end of the Cuevas Grocery building, will be handled in a manner that customers of the old branch wouldn’t have recognized — by an automatic teller outside the office.
The branch manager, Mary Ladner, will be on hand Monday through Thursday for an hour each morning, and from 9 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. each Friday. Those office hours will be extended if business warrants it, said Hancock president Leo W. Seal.
‘ ‘Electronic banking has become more and more a part of the overall picture,” Seal said. The automatic teller handles deposits, withdrawals, loans, transfers between accounts and cashes checks. For other transactions, such as the purchase of cashier’s checks, certificates of deposit and money
orders, the human touch is provided by Ladner, he said.
“A lot of folks here have got roots with Hancock Bank, and we felt that we had an obligation to provide them with banking facilities,” Seal said.
The residents' roots with Hancock Bank began with the opening of the Pearlington branch in 1902, but did not end with its closure in 1918. The following year, another branch was established a few miles to the north in Logtown. When the great sawmills along the Pearl River folded in 1937, the Logtown branch was closed.
Logtown today is a memory on the map of the buffer zone surrounding the National Space Technology Laboratories. Its residents were relocated when the National
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Continued from C-l Aeronautics and Space Administration ruled that there could be no inhabitants in the buffer zone. Many of them moved south to Pearlington, where they did not have to leave their beloved river.
There are now four Hancock Bank branches in Hancock County. One of the two Bay St. Louis offices, a stately turn-of-the-century structure facing the Mississippi Sound on Beach Boulevard, was once the main office for the bank, now headquartered in Gulfport. The third is located at NSTL and Pearlington is number four. A fifth branch will be constructed soon on U.S. 90 in Waveland, Seal said.
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