Gulfport VA Medical Center Historic District

The Naval Training Station that opened here during the First World War became a VA medical center serving veterans through the mid-century. The campus sits on Beach Boulevard — the beachfront strip that runs the length of the Mississippi coast — and the historic district includes buildings from the 1920s through the 1950s, federal structures from an era when Gulfport was still finding its footing between its origins as a French colonial outpost and the casino-and-resort economy that would arrive decades later. Hurricane Katrina flooded the campus in 2005. Some buildings were damaged beyond repair. What remains is a National Register historic district that documents how the federal government built permanent infrastructure on a coast where most early settlement had failed — the French abandoned Fort Maurepas by 1702 after crops died, water ran short, and illness spread. The VA presence here, together with Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, gave the Mississippi Gulf Coast a military architecture that persisted through catastrophe. The buildings that survived Katrina are worth seeing not because they're beautiful, but because they're still standing — which on this coast is its own kind of proof.