It’s been over 40 years since Ray Stevens sang about “that sleepy little town of Pascagoula” in the song “Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” but even then those lyrics were at best a half-truth. Pascagoula was and is still a small town, that’s true, but sleepy it was not.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, a society utterly convinced by chemical company Du Pont’s promise of “better living through chemistry,” along with a government eager to win the budding Cold War, spurred the town’s rapid industrial development and the population growth needed to support it.
Here’s a quick overview of the town’s industrial growth its effects on one local neighborhood.
