Gold Coast Watering Places

By: Dan Ellis

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Gold Coast Watering Places With “Gold Coast Watering Places,” Dan Ellis completes the fourth part of his Gulf Coast Quadrilogy, a series of local legacy heritage books covering the three coastal counties of Hancock, Harrison, and Jackson and their towns and cities of prominence. The earlier books by Ellis are: “All About Camille – the Great Storm,” “Lighthouses and Islands – of the Gulf Coast,” and “The Great Gulf Coast – Sails, Trails, and Rails.” In his new book, the meaning of the “Gold Coast” is threaded throughout its unfolding as it pertained to early gaming and entertainment – and is carried forward to the modern day casinos as we know them today. The “Watering Places” was an antebellum term used to promote tourism stop-overs at the early villages of Shieldsboro, Pass Christian, Mississippi City, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, and the Pascagoulas. Ellis' book is graphically portrayed by more than 200 photographs of archival records and postcards – chronologically arranged through the 1800s by location and then into the 1900s. More than sixty resplendent hotels and health spas are described in their richness and elegance as each vied against the other to attract the passengers who boarded the sailing schooners and steamboats that traversed the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile. Only a few of these hotel structures remain as all the others were ravished by fires or hurricanes, or simply to have been razed in order to provide for the ascent of progress. The cover of the book displays the elegance of the Grand Hotels as shown by the Mexican Gulf Hotel of Pass Christian that was built in 1883 and destroyed by fire in 1917. The White House Hotel of Biloxi that originated in 1899 and is in stages of being completely renovated and embellished to become a modern 110 room hotel. The Great Southern Hotel of Gulfport that was built by Captain Joseph T. Jones as a tribute to the creation of the town only for it to be razed in 1951, to allow throughway for the new four-lane Hwy. 90. The Buena Vista Hotel of Biloxi celebrated its grand opening on July 4, 1924. Its owners and management were the first to promote Biloxi and the Gulf Coast as a Convention center – only, for the elegant5-story Mediterranean architectural design to reach a period of such neglect that it was razed by fire in 1991.