Robert Ingalls built a shipyard on the Pascagoula River in 1938 and turned a fishing village into an industrial city within a decade. That pattern — federal investment reshaping a coast that had held just 2.5 percent of Mississippi's population at statehood — runs the length of the shoreline. Keesler Air Force Base opened in Biloxi in 1941. The federal government had already put up a VA hospital on Veterans Avenue in 1932, adjacent to what Keesler would become, and another on Beach Boulevard in Gulfport on the grounds of a WWI Naval Training Station. A B-29 training hangar went up in Gulfport in 1944. Katrina flooded the VA campuses, damaged ships under construction at Ingalls, and destroyed most of Beach Boulevard. The cranes at Ingalls survived. The Colonial Revival hospital buildings in Biloxi survived. The coast rebuilt. What the military built here, it largely kept.
