Round Island Lighthouse

A lighthouse stood on Round Island in the Mississippi Sound from 1859. The island eroded away completely — the lighthouse was left standing in open water. This coast has known what it means to lose ground. French colonizers landed nearby in 1699 and built Fort Maurepas, the first capital of French Louisiana, but abandoned it within three years — crops died, fresh water ran short, fever spread. When Mississippi entered the Union in 1817, the coastal population was barely two and a half percent of the state's total. The Gulf Coast remained a frontier, taking cultural cues from the Mediterranean instead of the cotton interior. Hurricane Camille hit in 1969. Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Both storms rewrote the shoreline. Round Island disappeared. The lighthouse stayed. In 2010, the structure was rescued and moved to the Pascagoula waterfront. It stands today as a National Register landmark, open to the public at no charge. In 2025, a maritime museum opened adjacent to it — billed as the world's smallest — housing historical photographs, wildlife fossils, and maritime artifacts. You can walk right up to it. A lighthouse that outlasted its island is a simple enough fact. The reason to go is to see what happens when stubbornness wins.