Hometown History: Last living Deer Island residents share story
What is now a great place to kayak, fish, or anchor your boat was once home to a small community of people.
For this month’s edition of Hometown History, WXXV’s Megan Fayard sits down with two of the last living former residents of Deer Island: the Baker Brothers.
Growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast often involves boating, fishing, southern charm, and lots of seafood, but for the Baker Brothers, it also included life on an island. “I was born June 30, 1941 on Deer Island. I lived there for 28 years, one month, 20 days, and about 16 hours and Camille hit.”
In 1852, the original Baker family settled on Deer Island. Over the generations, they had families of their own with children and grandchildren born and raised on the island. That family legacy eventually led to Alvin and Ronald Baker, two of the five Baker brothers who called Deer Island home during the mid-1900s. “My grandpa, my daddy’s daddy married, and he brought his bride to Deer Island. My daddy got married, he brought his bride to Deer Island. When I got married. I brought my bride to Deer Island. So, that was three generations.”
With only ten people living on the island, they say life was a dream. It was their own oasis. “I think it’s the greatest thing to ever happen to me. Up until, but there’s no way to go back. We had everything, a whole island as a playground. We had all the food we wanted to eat. We were living like, basically like kings out there. We were poor, real poor, but we were living like kings on an island with no neighbors, and just enjoying the hell out of it.”
Island living did not exempt the brothers from school. Each day, no matter the weather, they would load into a skiff and row the distance to Biloxi to attend their classes. “Good weather, we’d row it in say ten to 15 minutes. Bad weather, it would sometimes take 35, 40 minutes to an hour. Frank, by the way, he had 12 years perfect attendance at Biloxi High. Twelve years without missing a day, rowing back and forth from Deer Island, regardless of the weather.”
Attending school on the mainland introduced the Baker Brothers to many new friends, who they would paddle out to pick up so they could spend weekends on the island. “A lot of people didn’t know I lived there. We never talked about living over there.”
“Real quiet. I guess living on an island, you’re kind of bashful.”
“My closest friends and few cousins I went to school with, the only ones knew I lived on the island; I was so quiet. About the 11th grade, my wife, which was my girlfriend then, she did an article on me about living on the island, and after that I was a star.”
“We didn’t have the friends. We went to school to get into the friends and meet them, and we’d bring them back to the island after school and the holidays, and the summer months.”
The brothers have fond memories of their days filled with boating and making memories with friends, but fishing was a way of life on Deer Island, providing much of the seafood that ended up on the family’s dinner table. “I could remember one time us butchering hogs every October, two or three hogs every year, but it didn’t last. After we got up, we liked seafood so much. Me and my brother Donald, the one that just passed, we would fight over the cast net when we got out of school, to go on the outside beach. We’d both go out there to the outside beach and we’d stand with the net, and we’d see the mullet flip. Went down there and we’d catch 18 to 20 mullets, and that was our supper. And oysters. We’d have oysters all the time. My brother Frank, he loved oyster milk soup. He could eat it every day for a week. And we had shrimp, and we used to have crabs. Soft crabs. We used to walk down the beach with a moss line, hamper basket, like the grocery basket, and fill it up in like two hours. Maybe have 10 dozen crabs – soft shell.”
The brothers now hold many stories from their decades growing up and living on the island. “I was the youngest of the bunch and they were all working on the boats deck handing on the boats and stuff. So, I had to go grab the groceries that Saturday. And when you rowed across and we see boats, we had to cross the channel. I seen a boat coming and you had to make up your mind if you’re going to beat it or you going to wait till he passes, and it was going kind of slow, so I pull the ores to it, and come to find out, it was the Aunt Jenny, and Elvis Presley was on that boat. He couldn’t land because the people were crowding the piers, so he had to go down to one of the factories and land, and when I got to Oak Street, where I was going, where the little store is across the street, a pink Cadillac come down there and people were swarming on there, trying to catch him, but he went down to the factories. I don’t know if he ever got off the boat, but that was one of my little exciting things.”
But life on Deer Island wasn’t always easy. Energy was limited especially during cold winters. “The whole house didn’t get heated. It was cold. I can remember going to the bathroom and the toilet was frozen. We started out with an ice box with ice. Then we went to kerosene. Servell kerosene refrigerator, and when butane come along, that was it. We were in hog heaven. We got the biggest thing. We got a freezer and the refrigerator. Everything. Now we did have running water. Indoor plumbing and everything in the house. Like I said, 32 vote system was like a boat system. We had a storage battery with a generator that would charge those batteries. We had lights, but when you turned a light on, you used it. When you were finished, you turned it off, or the batteries would go down.”
A major challenge was bad weather. The small number of homes on the island weathered many storms over the years, including one of the most devastating to strike the Mississippi Gulf Coast: the hurricane of 1947. “The storm hit probably midnight. It got daylight and the tide was still rising, so we got in a chain, a human chain. We held hands. I can remember seeing a mullet jump in the backyard, and I thought I was on the bottom step, and when I stepped, I went up over my waist. But the water got four inches into our home in ’47. It knocked my grandpa’s house down; it knocked a portion of my uncle’s house down. But the Aiken home, the water got up to it then went down. Didn’t get in it. So, we rode it out at the grandma Aiken’s house. And it had about a 13, 14-foot tide. We were lucky.”
The Baker family left Deer Island to ride out the devastating Hurricane Camille in 1969, but when they returned home after the storm, there was nothing left. “We loaded everything, generators and everything we could we put it up high. That was a mistake, because there’s not height known for that, because it washed it down. We went back to the island. There was nothing there. We found our refrigerator; we found our bathtub. We found stuff like that. There was only one piece of wood, and it was out on the end of the wharf, wrapped up in some line. That was the only piece of wood that was left on the island.”
After being forced to leave Deer Island and move to the mainland, the Baker Brothers built their lives in Biloxi.
Decades later, Alvin’s waterfront property looks out at the island he once called home, a place that has changed drastically since his childhood, but remains filled with memories for the brothers. “We sneak over there every chance we get. I was over there last Sunday with my family, you know. We go every chance we get.”
“I just want to say, I had the best time of my life when i lived over there, and I enjoyed it, but that’s history. It’s gone.”
