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The Valena C. Jones School (1947), Bay St. Louis. Valena CJones was a prominent African American teacher'and school principal in Mississippi and Louisiana during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She was the wife of Bishop Jones, founder of Gulfside. Several schools are named in her honor (FEMA photo 2009).
Hancock County expanded public institutions in the post-war era. The Hancock County Library Board purchased the house at 123 Court Street in 1953 for use as a library. This building, a
Craftsman Vernacular house built between 1924 and 1930, is extant. Known as the City-County
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Memorial Library, it was initially a private organization and became a public library in 1965. In 1969, the library moved into a building at the comer of Dunbar and Ulman Avenues (Scharff, 1999, Hancock County Mississippi Library System website).
The NASA Mississippi Test Operations facility, now known as Stennis Space Center, created numerous employment opportunities. Its construction in the early 1960s correlated with increased population and property values. The facility also obliterated five small towns historically related to the lumber industry: Gainesville, Santa Rosa, Logtown, Westonia and Napoleon. The facility’s buffer zone abso'rbed'more than 120,000 acres of large timber holdings, small farms and homesteads. Choctaw were disproportionately impacted by the NASA’s land acquisition, which accelerated the demise of the tribe’s Hancock County communities (National Park Service, 2009).
Hurricane Camille struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969. Hancock County was particularly hard-hit. The storm took 12 lives and destroyed or damaged nearly 4,000 houses. In Waveland, the hurricane destroyed historic homes on the shore and caused widespread destruction in the half-mile between the beach and the railroad (Scharff, 1998). The storm destroyed buildings, bridges', roads and other infrastructure. It ruined or greatly impaired most of the county’s businesses’, including the entire tourist industry. Hurricane Camille marked the end of the post-World War II boom era in Hancock County and it would take years to recover (Scharff, 1998).
Today Bay St. Louis has the largest historic residential landscape on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. A combination of large and small, plain and elegant, vernacular and high style buildings, it is an
Survey Data Publication Hancock County Mississippi
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