Alphabet File page 164
The northern part of Hancock was cut off to form Pearl River County per act of the state legislature February 22, 1890.
The act organizing the (Hancock) county specifies no county seat.
It was provided by an act passed Feb. 2, 1825, that sessions of the County Courts be held part of the year in Bay St. Louis and part of the year in Pearlington, and that the use of either jail for the confinement of prisoners was left to the discretion of the sheriff.
Court was also held two or three years at a place called Center somewhere near the present Caesar.. Later the town of Gainesville on the Pearl River. then a shipping point of some importance, now a neglected little village, was made the county seat, but the time is uncertain. Information that has not yet been verified fixes the date at 1846.
Fire destroyed the Courthouse on April 1, 1853, and the county Seat was subsequently moved to Bay St. Louis . In addition to losses by fire, some of the county records are said to have been destroyed by Federal troops in 1863.. Where this was at Gainesville (MJS believes this) or at Bay St. Louis (MJS doubts) is uncertain.
On October 17, 1838, R. R. and Marie L. Pray deeded to the county of Hancock for the erection of a courthouse the lots of ground in the village of Shieldsborough on which the county courthouse now stands. This gift of land, more than a generation before the county seat was moved, is interesting as it evidences a campaign, even in those early days for the change Gainesville. (WPA)
Established Dec 14, 1812 (Eagle Centennial Aug. 1958)
Named for John Hancock, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Bounded north by Pearl River, east by Harrison, south by the Gulf of Mexico, and west by Louisiana.
Population Year - White Colored
1820 - 1,954
1830 - 1,962
1840 - 3,367
1850 - 3,672
1860 - 3,139 1,067 and 434 voters in county
1870 - 4,239 1,186
1880 - 8,313 1,764
1890 - 2,526
Production
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1879 - 410 bushels of corn produced.
1879 - 5,300 bushels of oats produced.
1837
1837 - Only church listed in Hancock County was the Methodist Episcopal Church in Monticello District with James McDonald as minister. There was no newspaper. There were 1755 Inhabitants (including area now Harrison County) and 720 slaves. (L.A. Besancon's Annual Register of Mississippi for 1838, Vol 1).
1853 - Records indicate the old courthouse at Gainesville burned March 31, 1853. Another Courthouse was at Bay St. Louis. Legend has it that the Bay Courthouse had concrete sidewalks. Many citizens from the country would not walk upon the sidewalks when they do their business, because they had never seen a sidewalk before and did not know its function. (PC&C p 27)
Hancock County: Created In 1812 ... in the amazing ten-year record of its board of supervisors, county was once two separate worlds.
When Hancock County was created in 1812, six full years before the Territory of Mississippi became a state, it scrawled its signature big and bold over half of what is now that Mississippi Gulf Coast, like that Declaration of Independence signer after whom it was named.
But over the succeeding century, as southern Mississippi's population spread out and communities increased, it sacrificed part of its magnificent coastline to help form Harrison County and relinquished a section of its northern area to Pearl River County. But it is still big and bountiful - still stretches along U.S. 90 from the Pearl River to Bay St. Louis - and is still 469 square miles of that healthy combination of piney woods, running streams and subtropical seashore which inveigles so many of those who casually come to visit to linger a lifetime.
For well over the first hundred years of its existence only a few hundred people really knew the charm of Hancock behind the coastline; its mile after mile of tall timber country which the sawmill crews had passed through and passed on; its almost endless realm of trees and streams ideal for the hunter and fisherman, and its sprawling open cattle ranges sparsely spotted with farming communities.
WOODS PENETRATED
But today rural electric power lines and secondary roads have penetrated its piney woods, home seekers are scouting its rivers and bayous and coast cuddling subdivisions and shouldering their way back farther and farther through the trees beyond the highway.
Just the last two years three huge suburban home developments began opening new homesites on the outskirts of Bay St. Louis. One on the Kiln road at the intersection of the Jordan River and Bayou LaCroix is clearing 8,000 waterfront lots on the 5-year program. Hancock County until recently was two separate worlds; the populated and popular beach area around Bay St. Louis and Waveland and the practically unknown back country. But now it can proudly point out to its Centennial visitors the beauty and availability of its woods and waters, and the attractive opportunities for comfortable modern living back a few miles in the county and only a few minutes from the busy booming Coast strip of Bay St. Louis. Since time immemorial Hancock's chief sources of income have been tourists and timber. They still are. The tourist business is growing steadily, and in spite of the fact that in 1957 the last several hundred acres of virgin long leaf pine in the state surrendered to the saw in Hancock County, the revenue of the county from its timber cut for pilings, poles and pulpwood still runs around $2,000,000 income annually. This is easy to understand - as every traveler is aware of Hancock's panorama of pine thickets that parallel Highway 90 after it leaves the Pearl River until it gets at Bay St. Louis.
LARGE MILK PRODUCER
But there is nothing along the Coast highway to indicate that Hancock is the largest milk producing county on the Coast, for the majority of its 99 Grade A dairies are concentrated in the central and northern part of the county. Some of the finest Jersey herds in the state of
Mississippi are the proud possession of Hancock County - supplying the Gulf Coast and the Louisiana-Mississippi Milk Producers plant in Picayune - an industry representing nearly a million dollars annual income to the county - a comparatively new industry a little over ten years old which gained its great stimulus around 1950 when rural electrification achieved full coverage.
Nor does the U.S. 90 route reveal the story that Hancock is the only county in the state outside of the Delta that produces flood rice commercially - that the first carload of rice in Hancock's agricultural history was shipped in 1956 from the 133 acre plantation of L. L. Fletcher of Texas Flat Road just a few miles north of Bay St. Louis - and that he produced 20 barrels to the acre, which is 6 barrels an acre better than the Louisiana average, a state famous for flooded rice.
This represents a new agricultural product in Hancock - although J. L. Crump of Holly Bluff has been producing highland rice now for 16 years. (SH 4/1958)