Beach Boulevard is one of the best parts of the Coast. Here’s how it happened.

Do you, like me, drive the beach roads whenever feasible?

Other Mississippi Coast roadways are quicker, but none match the eye-candy vistas. Endless blue summer skies. The sparkling sound waters every autumn. White waves of stormy winter nor’easters. Puffy clouds year-round.

Rare is another region in the United States where a person can drive 40-plus miles with one side of the road — the Southside — wide open. Walking. Fishing. Photography. Beach-combing. Bird-watching. Sun-worshiping. Sunset gazing. Seining. It’s all there for those who take advantage of the free offerings.

If we’d quit fooling with Mother Nature with stop-gap measures like the Bonnet Carré spillway and use our drainage brains, such Southside amenities will be around for generations to come. Bad weather and hurricanes — inevitable for coastal denizens — cause enough problems without our adding more.

To preserve the Southside for posterity, we must use it. Cherish it. Fight for it.

When the Coast first started regulating growth in the 20th century, most saw the wisdom of an unencumbered Southside by limiting buildings. Then came the Coast’s civil rights movement and a court ruling that made much of the Southside beach open to all.

Be thankful we are not wall-to-wall condos and hotels, or closed communities that forbid their “private” beaches to others. There’s plenty enough of that in other resorts.

So my question: Do you appreciate the Coast’s Southside bounty? Do you take advantage of it? Do you know the timeline that created it?

To understand what inspired this beach drum roll, study the cartoon with today’s missive. When I first saw it on the Feb. 16, 1920, front page of this newspaper I laughed and thought, “We’ve come a long way, Baby!”

The Coast got its first automobile in 1900, but it took several decades and a “good roads” movement to make decent highways. Study the cartoon closely and note there is no seawall in 1920. That three-county $5.5 million (that’s $83 million today) wall project wasn’t finished until the early 1930s.

So why was the entire Coast willing to pay up with extra taxes? At that time, more than 70% of our population lived within one mile of the beach, so there was a vested interest in protection of the road, trolley tracks, houses and businesses near the water.

I worry that as populations spread into rural communities and the pineywoods, support for the Southside will dwindle. It shouldn’t. The Southside is vital to the Mississippi Coast way of life.

Knowledge is power, so bear with me through a short lesson of the making of the Southside. When explorer Iberville arrived in 1699 to start an coastal colony for France’s King Louis XIV, he walked on sand beaches. Springs and bayous dumped directly into the sound, trees and wetlands grew up to the waterline.

The beach in 1699 was pristine and natural, not adjectives we can use today although we still have a beach. But it is definitely not “man-made,” as some Coast promoters tout. It is “replenished,” in the way Atlantic City, Miami Beach and other coastal resorts regularly replenish their sand.

For 200 years after Iberville, the beach was replenished by sand dunes, sea grasses and other natural erosion-stopping wonders. We began messing with that in the mid-1800s by creating sandy roads between the seaside villages that are today’s cities.

At the turn of the 20th century, no straight-through beach road yet existed. But each time another road section appeared, another spring closed off, another trolley track was laid or electric line strung, the pristine beach changed. We really messed with Mother Nature’s plan.

Then came the 1915 hurricane that wiped out half the beachfront. The resulting seawall movement was quickly waylaid by World War I so the the first concrete mile wasn’t dedicated until 1928.

Then came World War II. Little natural beach remained because we’d messed with the natural replenishing process. The seawall leaked sand and water lapped at the steps, all undermining the wall.

Worse yet, the beach road was in danger of erosion and the nation’s dependency on it as a connector to other national defense was in jeopardy.

Then came the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1951 they dredged the first sand 1,500 feet from shore to create a 300-foot-wide beach in Harrison County, protecting the road and creating an amazing sandy playground that spurred a post-WWII tourism boom.

Most recently, Hurricane Katrina required changes to the seawall. You likely know the rest of the story. Except for places where sand-anchoring fences, grasses and dunes are allowed, the sand is still groomed. The wind-blown road sand, combined with water erosion, requires regular beach replenishment and road cleanup.

That is why I laughed when I saw the 1920 beach road cartoon. A lot has changed. But really?

Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923.

This story was originally published February 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.