Pascagoula opens museum to oldest house in Mississippi Valley

The oldest house in the Mississippi Valley is getting a real museum.

The La Pointe-Krebs House foundation will host a ribbon cutting Friday to open the museum dedicated to the historical significance of the house.

Archeology professors and a geographer will speak, and Archbishop of Mobile Thomas John Rodi will be there to represent the major contribution the Catholic Church and its records have made to piecing together the house’s history.

La Pointe-Krebs is 20 years older than the country. Recent dating shows it was built in the fall of 1757, only a half century after Bienville discovered and explored the northern Gulf of Mexico.

A complete restoration of the house, however, is still two to three years away, and it is not open to the public, explained Liz Ford, longtime supporter of the preservation project.

“But after 10 years, the museum will finally be available to the public,” she said.

Full of artifacts, a museum building on the grounds flooded in Katrina’s surge.

“Those who have seen an empty room here and know we’ve been closed for 10 years, they’re going to be floored when they see this,” said Mc Wixon, executive director of the La Pointe-Krebs Foundation.

New brochures will be going out to welcome centers and the museum will be advertised by the Mississippi Gulf Coast Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The hours of operation will be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.

Intricate journey into history

The professionally put-together exhibits make it a striking museum.

Among the artifacts, there’s a replica of a cotton gin invented by Hugo Krebs, 20 years before Eli Whitney patented his in 1794. The Krebs gin is documented by a British historian of the early Americas, Bernard Romans, in his diaries from a visit to the La Pointe-Krebs house in 1772.

What the public will see includes:

▪  Home life at the house itself

▪  Changes the structure has gone through physically in 250 years

▪  First explorers to the area and Native Americans

▪  Local legends and lore

▪  Colonial times and European settlers here

▪  What work was like in the mid- to late 1800s in the area

▪  Early fishing, boat building and lumber industries that established this region

▪  The Longfellow House, first of a rotating exhibit

▪  The importance of conserving artifacts

“It’s important for kids to come see this,” Wixon said. “If they don’t appreciate it now, in a few years, they will.”

Unique time

“This property is the hub of our unique history,” said Melanie Moore, an early member of the La Pointe-Krebs Foundation. She calls the house and the museum a central point in the community.

Pascagoula has a rich history and it has always known the house was old. The structure spent years as a minor attraction called the Old Spanish Fort, even though it wasn’t Spanish or a fort.

The house is French-Canadian colonial architecture, the only example on the Gulf Coast, Wixon said. The museum opening Friday will fully reflect the importance of that.

Representatives from Colonial Williamsburg have come in recent years to check it out and encourage its preservation.

“You lose stuff like this and you never get it back,” Wixon said.

The meticulous renovation that is underway should be enough to give it National Landmark status, a goal of Wixon’s.

The team working on the reconstruction brings in expertise in not only construction but also timber and history.

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has been a huge help in explaining to the state and to the world, “we have something special here and it needs protection,” said Wixon. “There’s no way to get this done totally at the local level.”

This story was originally published June 29, 2016 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Pascagoula opens museum to oldest house in Mississippi Valley."