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302	TOURS
Back of the house are the ruins of the brick slave quarters. The piers that support the house itself are joined with bars to form cages. In these cages the Negroes who were brought from Africa were kept until they had been tamed enough to be moved into slave quarters in the rear.
Painted on the wall panels in the hall and in the front bedrooms are huge canvases of hunting and fishing scenes done by Coulon, a 19th century artist of New Orleans.
The estate now belongs to a New Orleans business man who has turned it into a cattle range. Brahma bulls, half again as large as the average bull, with shaggy humps above their shoulders, drink at the spring where the Choctaw Indians camped. Near the spring is a mound of clam shells left by the Indians.
At 82.4 m. on US 90 is the junction with a wide graveled road.
Right on this road is the picturesque NETTIE KOCH HOME, 0.4 m. (R) (private), erected before 1820. The original part of the house, consisting of two rooms, is constructed of logs. Lean-tos, ells, and wings that are connected to the main house by latticed porches have been added, giving it a rambling appearance. The kitchen floor is of timbers 30 inches wide and several inches thick, taken from a dismantled flatboat that drifted down Pearl River. The white-washed interior is furnished with old relics, some of them having been brought from Denmark, his native country, by Dr. Koch. The house is surrounded by live oaks, sycamores, and cedars. A red camellia japonica in the small courtyard rises higher than the house.
At 2.2 m. on this same road is LOGTOWN (500 pop.). A sawmill here has been in continuous operation since 1850. It stands on the bank of Pearl River, was built with slave labor, and was worked by slaves for the first 10 years. BOUGAHOUMA BAYOU forms the dividing line between the white residential section and Possum Walk, the Negro residential section.
PEARLINGTON, 87.7 m. (10 alt., 318 pop.), is a town which has been revived, the new US 90 short-cut to New Orleans having put it back on a main road for the first time in more than a decade. It was one of the pioneer lumbering towns in this once-important lumbering area, and later was the terminal for a Louisiana-Mississippi automobile ferry, now discontinued. Many large, Spanish-moss-covered live oak trees, and some of the largest and oldest camellia japonicas on the Mississippi Coast grow in and around Pearlington.
At 88 m. a bridge crosses PEARL RIVER, the boundary line between Mississippi and Louisiana, 44 miles NE. of New Orleans. Free bridges at the Rigolets (pron. rig-lees) and Chef Menteur Passes in Louisiana; 47 miles by a toll bridge across Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana (car and driver $1; passengers 25<t). The river was given its name by the French because of the large pearl oysters found on the banks.
TOUR ia	303
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Side Tour iA
Gulfport to Ship Island, 12 m.
Excursion boats leave yacht harbor and west pier at Gulfport twice daily during summer season. Round-trip fare $1.
Surf bathing and other aquatic sports.
No overnight accommodations.
SHIP ISLAND, a low white sandy bar lying between the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico, is approximately seven miles long and half a mile wide, its length roughly paralleling the mainland east to west. The island has a strategic position, an excellent harbor formed by a "V? of deep water. The place is rich in early history and legend.
Intermittently from 1699 until the late 1720's Ship Island was the harbor for French exploration and settlement of the Gulf Coast from Mobile to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Iberville delayed here three days before he made his landing in small boats on the shore of Biloxi Bay (see BILOXI), and later, using the island as a base, he explored the Mississippi River for nearly 300 miles from its mouth. Even after the capital was moved from Biloxi to Mobile, Ship Island continued to be the port of entry for vessels from France. To Ship Island came the first marriageable girls for the early colonists, bringing their chests, or "casquettes? with them. In 1717 the first fort and warehouse were constructed here near the present pass. In 1724 what was probably the first cargo of pine lumber to be sent from the Mississippi Coast was shipped from here.
In 1815, when the British general, Pakenham, tried to take New Orleans, Ship Island served as the base for the British Navy. From the island harbor the British fleet of 60 vessels sailed to what was to be the last naval engagement in which Americans fought a foreign foe in American waters (see Tour 1).
On the extreme western tip of the island is FORT MASSACHUSETTS, used during the War between the States. As early as 1847 the island was reserved for military purposes; in 1858 the War Department, carrying out an act of Congress of 1857, authorized the building of a fort to protect the short cut into New Orleans, Rigolets Pass, the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain. In December i860 work was still under way, and the Government had ordered 48 large cannon shipped from Pittsburg. The outbreak of the war in 1861 left the Union garrison isolated on the island, and in May 1861 they destroyed the fort in order to prevent its falling into Confederate hands. For three months, from July to September 1861, five companies of Confederates held the fort, having rearmed it with eight small cannon after its "destruction.? Because of the constant threat of the Federal fleet then blockading the mouth of