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ON October 9th the Hancock Bank —with headquarters in Gulfport and offices in Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach and North East Gulfport and with resources over $30 million — celebrated its 60th Anniversary.
It was the first bank established on the western end of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The following review of its activities, during those intervening years since it began business in 1899 in Bay St. Louis, is actually a resume of the Coast’s steady march from almost national anonymity to its present recognized position as one of the brightest spots on the business map of the U. S., and one of the fastest growing industrial areas in the Deep South.
1899 was a dramatic year. The Spanish American War was won and over. The country had settled down again to the pursuits of peace, as highlighted by the introduction that year of the nation's first canned ten cent soup by Joseph Campbell Company. In the wings
This tiny cottage was the first Hancock Bank building (then called Hancock County Bank) back in 1899 at Bay St. Louis. It was located on a plot of ground near and now owned by St. Joseph Academy. and had been used previously as a City Hall.
THE HANCOCK BANK
. . .And Its Six Decades of Participation In the Progress of the Mississippi Gulf Coast
By Ray M. Thompson
the Twentieth Century was waiting impatiently to introduce the Machine Age. Down here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast the new city of Gulfport had just incorporated, the completion of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad had just been financially assumed by Captain Joseph T. Jones, an oil millionaire from Pennsylvania, and at Bay St. Louis a group of business men sat down to organize the first bank in Hancock County.
At that time Bay St. Louis, the county seat of Hancock, was from a business standpoint almost completely isolated from the rest of the Coast. There was of course, the L&N Railroad bridge across the Bay of St. Louis—but there was no bridge for wagons or carriages, not even a ferry. All personal contacts with the other Coast communities east of the Bay had to be done by rail or boat, or over the frequently impassable country road that went through Kiln, wound around the Bay and joined Old Pass Road to Biloxi at Pass Christian.
However, paradoxically, at that time Hancock County possessed two of the busiest Coast communities — Pearlington and Logtown. Both were booming lumber towns on the Pearl River.
Pearlington had been founded by Simon Favre, one of the first recorded settlers in Hancock County and, incidentally, the great, great, great grandfather of the Hancock Bank’s present president, I eo W. Seal. Before the War Between the States, Pearlington had been a ginning and downriver shipping point for inland Mississippi cotton. But after the war lumber replaced cotton on the Pearl River, and at Pearlington was
November—December 1959
Art by Joe Mahoney • Photo by Hamill
established the farrous Poitevant. and Favre Lumber Company, in its day one of the most successful lumber companies in Mississippi. It had supplied the ties that built the New Orleans, Mobile and Chattanooga Railroad (now the Coast part of the L&N), had furnished the pilings for the Eads Jetty at the mouth of the Mississippi and had shipped to New Orleans the timber used to construct the historic Cotton Exposition buildings in 1884.
Logtown was originally known as Chalons, but was called Logtown by the Indians because cf the great amount of timber handled at its landing, a name which being more easily remembered and more appropriate finally stuck. At Logtown, was located the famous Weston Lumber Company which, during its long and successful operation under Weston ownership cut over two billion feet of hardwood and pine.
These two big mills at Pearlington and Logtown, plus a couple of dozen other smaller mills operating in the county, exported about 98% of their timber and lumber, shipping it down the Pearl River in coastal schooners and loading it at Ship Island into vessels from all over the world.
It was obvious that Bay St. Louis — in its capacity as the seat of county government and trade center for the area, with this flourishing lumber business in the county and the new seafood canning industry pioneered by the Dunbar brothers prospering within its city limits, and with the railroad bringing in more and more businessmen with financial affairs to handle—could no longer
Tell them you saw it in DOWN SOUTH. ThanksI
function efficiently without, a bank.
This first Hancock County Bank was not pretentious — a capitalization of $10,000 and deposits the day it opened of $8,337.41—but it was a solid, substantial bank founded and operated ever since on the fundamentals of stability, personal integrity and public service. How well it was established has been borne out by the fact that this bank has survived four distinct national periods of financial panic — 1907, 1914, 1921 and 1929—the last of which wiped out three coast banks.
The Men Who Have Headed It
In all its sixty years of existence— the Hancock Bank has had only four presidents. The first was Peter Hell-wege, an investment banker of New Orleans who lived in Bay St. Louis. Eugene Roberts, who was cashier and vice president with Mr. Hellwege, succeeded him as second president. The third was Horatio S. Weston, head of the Weston Lumber Company, son of that dynamic Henry Weston who had arrived on the Coast flat broke in 1846, who worked at the Wingate sawmill at Logtown which he and two partners later purchased, who finally bought out his two partners and developed the eminently successful Logtown lumber company that bore his name. The fourth is the present president, Leo W. Seal, who worked at Henry Weston’s mill for 20 cents a day when he was 11 years old, who was cashier of the bank in 1932 when Horatio Weston died, and whom the directors of the bar k unanimously voted to succeed Mr. Weston as presi-(Continued on Page 22)