Barq's Root Beer — Invented in Biloxi

Edward Charles Edmond Barq, a French-born chemist, started bottling root beer in Biloxi in 1898. The Mississippi Gulf Coast had been a French colonial foothold two centuries earlier — Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville built Fort Maurepas here in 1699, making it the first capital of French Louisiana before the settlement failed and the population drained north. When Mississippi gained statehood in 1817, the coast held just 2.5% of the state's people. It stayed a frontier with Mediterranean cultural threads, more connected to the Gulf than to the rest of Mississippi. Barq was mixing sarsaparilla in that same beach town a generation before the Coast earned its "America's Riviera" nickname, before the casinos, before the hurricanes that would twice erase the shoreline. What he bottled became one of the most recognized soft drink brands in America. Coca-Cola owns it now. The original factory is gone. The brand outlived the building by a century. Barq is buried in the Old Biloxi Cemetery alongside shrimpers, soldiers, and potters — the people who actually made the coast work while the rest of the state looked the other way.