Turkey Creek History
It is also important to note that the pioneers who settled the poorly drained “eight forties” were every bit as visionary, industrious and innovative as the men who, decades later, would establish the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad, the Port of Gulfport, and the city of Gulfport to the south. With far less financial, political or social capital than the celebrated founders of Gulfport, Turkey Creek’s early settlers successfully fulfilled the intent of the 1858 cession of section 22 to Mississippi. They created arable land to practice sustainable agriculture and developed a viable, self-sufficient American community bound together by local customs and institutions. Clearing footpaths and wagon trails to follow the upland’s winding crest, they built their own homes, farms, businesses, church and school.
Despite their geographic isolation “out” in Harrison County, the people of Turkey Creek did live with considerable connection to trends and events elsewhere on the coast, including the promulgation of black Methodism and the eventual founding of Gulfport. By the 1880s, when the beachfront resumed its ante-bellum prominence as a weekend and summer retreat for well-off southern whites, women from Turkey Creek and other black coastal communities worked there as domestics. It was their labor which kept such noted residences as Grass Lawn in Gulfport and Beauvoir in Biloxi maintained in the grandeur of this era. Kizziah Evans, born into slavery in Virginia, trucked wagon loads of laundry to and from the beachfront weekly, even though she was also one of Turkey Creek’s principal landowners and matriarchs.
