(theme song) ♪♪ - [Walt] Coming up on Mississippi Roads, we head to the Coast and visit the Mississippi Aquarium, tour the Lapointe Krebs House, and the T.F.

Monti War & Peace Private Model Collection.

All that coming up now on Mississippi Roads.

♪♪ Hi, welcome to Mississippi Roads.

I'm Walt Grayson.

This week, we're taking you down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to show off some places you may or may not be aware of.

Now, I'm sure you've heard of our first stop, and that's one of Mississippi's newest attractions.

It's the Mississippi Aquarium in Gulfport.

Now, not only does the Mississippi Aquarium do a great job of showing off one of our planet's most delicate ecosystems, but they're deeply involved in research and conservation of animals.

And they do a great job of educating the visitors about our fragile oceans.

♪♪ (splash) - The Aquarium Project is about ten years in the making and it really started grown momentum when we put a shovel in the ground and actually started construction.

The community support has been just tremendous.

For everybody along the Coast to really have a jewel like this in their own backyard.

- Coastal Mississippi is the regional tourism organization, so we're very involved in the community with our elected officials.

And when the official word came out several years ago that the Coast was going to be the site for the Mississippi Aquarium, to say that we were excited would be an understatement.

This is a world-class facility with just such unique exhibits located in a beautiful downtown area along the waterfront.

Visitors can come not only enjoy the aquarium, but really spend several days here.

- Our aquarium is a bit different than most aquariums because we're kind of inside and outside.

A lot of aquariums are all housed in one building.

And we have just under six acres and a lot of our exhibits are outside.

And we wanted to showcase really what our minor theme of the aquarium is, and that's "From Brown to Blue and Beyond."

So we highlight the brown waters of the Mississippi coming down to the Gulf and beyond.

And what you see behind me is about 400,000 gallons of the beyond and some of the species that you would see out in the open ocean.

You'll see some sharks, fish, eels, turtles, a good variety of different species that you would be able to see kind of in the beyond portion of the ocean.

On the third floor, we do have two touch tanks where you get to interact with some invertebrates and rays and sharks.

And it's one of the things the kids love the most.

It's the first thing they come to in this building.

The smiles and the laughs that you get up there are really precious.

And then you kind of corkscrew down through this building really highlighted with two very interesting things.

One is the tunnel that you're able to walk through, which is suspended halfway through the exhibit.

Really the only one in North America that's suspended just halfway through an exhibit.

And then you get down to this beautiful window behind me that's 35 feet tall, 25 feet wide.

It just showcases the entire exhibit really, really well where you can see all of the species swimming around.

- This is our oceans tank.

We have 300,000 plus gallons of saltwater that we utilize to sustain life.

It's concreted, has to be epoxy-sealed.

The rock work and everything is carved and done out of concrete.

We created spaces and holes for all kinds of animals to utilize as they would in natural habitats.

You'll see like eels and crevices and different things and techniques that the company that designed that did.

They worked with the biologists and other staff to make sure that this is best possible for the animals.

We're looking for clarity and quality, quality being most important to us.

But as a visitor, you're coming in here and we want it to be clear and clean for you to see the animals as best you possibly can, too.

We have a 90,000 gallon freshwater exhibit that runs through the Mississippi River animals.

We have an alligator and crocodilian exhibit that we keep that going.

There's allowable limits for everything from temperature and salinity and pH.

And we're monitoring those depending on what the animals are, depending what the biologists say, we can manipulate, balance, change, what their water quality parameters are.

(splash) - The reaction that we get is astonishment.

They don't realize the quality of our aquarium.

They don't realize the breadth and depth of what we really do.

And especially when we explain, not just the aquarium side of things, but the science and research side of things.

Stella the shark swimming around behind me is a medical marvel.

She had a kink in her spine, and we did the first ever spinal surgery on Stella.

We brought in human spinal doctors to assist our veterinary team.

Our veterinary team included friends from South Carolina and Texas and then local orthopedic spinal surgeons.

The nice thing about this is we're advancing veterinary science, and if we really didn't do the surgery, her outcome was very poor.

So we're very happy to say that the surgery went very well.

We learned a lot.

And then Banner is our green sea turtle who was hit by a boat and was rehabbed with our friends over at the Florida Aquarium in Tampa.

And after a successful rehab, he needed a forever home.

And so we were able to transport Banner over to our exhibit, and you'll see him on display doing some funny things in our habitat.

- Working with animals has been a joy, something I've planned on doing when I was like four years old.

I've been doing this for over 20 years and every day I learn something new.

Obviously, the ultimate is high level animal care at all points in time, high guest esthetics and what's going on and it's only going to get better and better from here on out.

- [Child] Fish!

Fish!

Fish!!

- Children's reactions are the most precious.

They walk in and they get to do the touch experience up top first, and they are thrilled.

But the biggest thrill is when they walk around the corner and they see this big window for the first time and they are just mesmerized.

- The Mississippi Aquarium is a phenomenal attraction.

And with the opening of the aquarium, it really does elevate coastal Mississippi to become what we all believe and what we all know is a premier destination.

- [Child] Look at this one!.

- We talked about this project being transformational and generational.

And seeing the kids' facial expressions and their reactions really is that generational part because this was really built, not just for us, but for our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids.

So it's been really exciting to see that.

- In our next story, we go from one extreme to the other.

Whereas the Mississippi Aquarium is one of the newest attractions on the Coast, up next, we visit one of the oldest places on the Coast.

It's the LaPointe-Krebs House in Pascagoula.

And although it's nicknamed The Spanish Fort, it tells us a whole lot about French colonial history.

- This building is 264 years old.

The LaPointe-Krebs House was built in 1757 by a German immigrant named Hugo Krebs.

It's the oldest home in the state of Mississippi, and it's the oldest scientifically confirmed structure in the entire Mississippi Valley, which is from here up to Minnesota and into the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains, that entire swath of land.

And it's also the only existing tabby structure on the entire Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida.

The home itself was essentially tabby concrete, and tabby is made from oyster shells.

- It's essentially an oyster-shell concrete.

The tabby walls are approximately 12 inches thick.

They were built in courses.

They would build...

They would put forms down, and they would pour the first pour of tabby and it would harden.

And then they'd build up as, as the time went on for each successive pour.

- I really contribute the house still standing, especially as well as it is today, to that tabby.

That is really what's kept this thing together all these years.

This house is a bit older than our country, and it's gone through multiple owners, of course.

So for a while there, some of the history got lost through time, and it was referred to as the Old Spanish Fort for a long time.

Now it is not a fort, never really has been, and it is a French Colonial style.

- It was known as Spanish Fort in the 1950s, and as a result, everybody in Pascagoula that's lived here for a long time, they don't know the place as LaPointe-Krebs House.

They know it as the Old Spanish Fort.

The Navy donated two cannons in 1957, which does help it look like a fort.

And the cannons are real interesting that they were captured off the British warship, The Macedonia during The War of 1812 off the coast of Africa.

But they have nothing to do with (chuckles) with the history of the house.

- Starting in about the 1980s, they really started trying to push this name of the LaPointe-Krebs House as we have it now.

Now originally, this land was owned by Joseph Simon de la Pointe, who was a French soldier and also explorer that came with d'Iberville and Bienville down here to this area.

He ended up receiving this land in a land grant from Governor Cadillac and started a plantation here.

He had two daughters with him here, and one of his-- his youngest daughter married Hugo Ernest Krebs, patriarch of the Krebs family, which is still very prevalent here, who ended up inheriting all of this property through that marriage, including that plantation.

So what we have here is what remains of that colonial plantation.

Now there's been additions to it, of course.

Krebs had 14 children, so this house had multiple additions to it throughout time.

But what really stands here is one of the oldest structures in the entire country.

- Hurricane Katrina caused some significant damage to the house.

We had some roof damage.

We had four feet of water, of storm surge in the house which crept into the open archeological pits underneath the house, which caused some degradation of the historic tabby.

- Yeah, the house was closed from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 all the way until we got our adjacent museum building out here on the grounds open, which opened in the summer of 2016, so 11 years the house was closed.

- I started over here in 2014.

It had been neglected for a long time, you know, Katrina put a working on it.

And for whatever reason, it just wasn't being looked after.

You know, there was just a delay between Katrina and when people finally started paying attention to it.

And by then, a lot of the damage was done, particularly in the attic.

Termites had trashed the attic.

A lot of the the posts were ate up.

I mean, they ate slap through them.

So we filled all those in, consolidated everything.

And that there used to be a gallery out on the south side.

That all came up.

There was a gallery all the way around.

We took it all up.

It was all termite infested.

You know, everything underneath on the ground was ate up.

So it was in very bad shape.

- After Katrina, one of the, I guess, most important entities to help us on the road to restoration was Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

MDAH, for short, was instrumental in getting funding for restoration for hurricane recovery for the museum as well as the house.

- In 2017, we came back and we stabilized, we raised the west end, that northwest, excuse me... yeah, the west/northwest corner had settled about 14 inches.

And so we jacked that corner up all the way up to the attic, and we put in a whole new truss system to relieve all the termite-eaten trusses that are up there.

And then it got new shingles.

- Obviously when you're restoring any structure, you want to keep as much of the historic accuracy as possible and the original structure as possible.

A lot of the attic is what remains now, even though it has been, you know, eaten up by termites for the most part.

A lot of the attic is original wood from 1757.

- You can't replace anything that's part of the original structure.

We have to go back with what was there.

So if it was pine, it goes back as pine.

If it was cypress, or being interpreted as cypress, then it's going back as cypress.

You know, you can't just go buy this stuff.

It has to be heart pine and it has to have a certain number of growth rings per inch.

It has to be reclaimed.

You know, if it's been replaced before, you can replace it, too.

But if it's part of the original structure, you got to save it.

And that's the rule.

- The more I've worked with these building processes, the more apparent it is to me how hard those people had to work and how difficult they had life back then.

I mean, it was not easy forming the house to build a house because it was very labor-intensive and it was a lot of hard work and you had to be committed to survival.

I think we don't appreciate how difficult they had it and how hard they had to work just to survive.

- The value to me is that this is where Jackson County started.

This is the oldest place in Jackson County and thus Pascagoula, and similar to the Alamo to Texas, this is where it all began for us here in Pascagoula.

It's a source of local pride and allows visitors to come in and connect with the past and see how people 300 years ago lived and how they constructed their houses.

- We will now officially rededicate LaPointe-Krebs House.

(applause) - I just think that the house is an example of a type of architecture and building material that's unique to this area.

You know, we're we're working on getting National Historic Landmark status.

And one of the things that I've tried to emphasize to the people with the Parks Services is you know, this is essentially a settlement house.

This house was out there in the hinterlands, not surrounded by a lot of people.

And just how many of those are still standing?

- We're hoping with this restoration that this thing will stand at least another 260 years.

That is our main goal in this whole thing, is preserving this wonderful treasure.

This is a national gem, it really is.

You don't see these construction techniques.

You don't really get these tangible ties to the European settlement of the Gulf Coast and the French occupation down here.

It just doesn't exist.

So this thing really represents all of that.

You know, as I said, it's almost 20 years older than the country.

And it's still here.

It's still persevering through hurricanes, storms, everything.

It's still here.

- In our last story, we visit one man's collection that's really turned into quite a display for visitors down on the Gulf Coast.

It's the T.F.

Monti War and Peace Collection, and it consists of about 4000 model airplanes, and tanks, jeeps, and cars, and trucks, and associated pieces.

And it's on display in a little museum in Waveland.

- Sitting in one piece, the T.F.

Monti private model collection.

T.F.

Monti was my dad.

He was 93 when he died back in 2009, and this is his collection.

Most of them are plastic models that we used to build back in the sixties and seventies.

And he's got about 4000 of them.

He's got cars, and planes, and boats, and ships, and a lot of military equipment.

And he always wanted a private museum, a public museum that he could show people his models for free.

And so before he died, that's what we did.

We surprised him with a museum.

Dad started building models back in 1930, and probably for 20 or 30 years, he built these balsa wood and paper models.

He had hundreds of those at one time.

Back in 1950 or so, my oldest brother won a contest and it was a plastic model of a ship.

He asked my daddy to help him make it, and that started the collection of plastic models.

And from there, it grew to 4000 models.

They were all in a little two-bedroom house, and he built shelves and he'd just stack them in there.

That's what he did for 50 or 60 years.

- He would love the model.

If he was building the model, he was an engineer working on that model.

And if he got to the point where he would get to the next stage, he might be the mechanic putting, you know, the oil in the engines or working on maintaining the aircraft, the electronics.

And then he'd become the pilot and then he would fly the plane.

He said he actually went around the world and never left his house.

- Hurricane Katrina came along and he had about three feet of water in the house.

And so we had to move all the models out into the carport and close the carport.

Once the house was rebuilt, Mom wouldn't let them back in the house.

So meanwhile, we ended up with an empty building.

We decided we were going to move his models there, but not tell him.

Every day I'd go visit him and he said, What did you do today?

And I said, Well, we painted shelves in my new office, and this went on about two or three weeks.

And he said, you had a lot of shelves.

Said well Dad, we got a lot of stuff.

And so one Saturday night while he was at mass at church, we took about 50 models and we spread them around.

And so Sunday morning after church, we said, Daddy, come see my new office.

And so we all came to see the new office and looked around he said where did you get the models?

And I said, well, they're yours and he started to cry.

I used to tell your mama all the time that one day I'd love to have a museum, we could show models.

And so for the next three months, we brought the rest of the models in little by little.

In fact, we had to extend the building a little bit to get them all in.

- Til I was in my forties, I couldn't touch these models.

Well, the day came that we could start moving these models from my grandfather's house to this museum.

That might be one of the most happiest days in my life, because it was Christmas morning and I got to unpack all of these models and I was fascinated.

In the military room, I said, this is my room.

I want to do all the military.

And so I went in and I spent hours putting models on shelves, taking them off, rearrange it until I got it the way I wanted it.

- He just was fascinated by airplanes, but he also was fascinated with everything.

And he wanted the museum called something that not just focused on military and war, but things that made people happy, you know, cars and boats and ships.

And so he named it.

So we added the part about the T.F.

Monti Private Model Collection so people know what it was.

but he named it War and Peace.

He was the curator for six months before he died.

Some days, nobody would come and he said we need to do more advertising.

I'd say, Dad, I said, you know, this is a free museum.

We don't have big budget here.

So the next day, 12 people would come and he'd want to show everybody the models personally.

- It was really neat to watch him do that.

In fact, it was probably more fun watching him walk around with other people and talk about the models than actually putting the models on the shelf.

It's a good six months.

- For a good six months, he was very happy and we were happy doing it and we've been doing it since 2009.

But we've had people from all over the world and I think just about every state from China, from Japan, from Vietnam, from several places in South America, it's been fun.

It's fun meeting people.

We get all kinds of good stories.

We had two retired guys come in one time and they went straight to the back where the planes were.

And I mean, they stayed they knew all the planes, every single plane and finally I asked them, what did you do before you retired?

And guy looked at the other said, well, he was in charge of McDonnell Douglas in their research and development, and I worked for him.

And these guys, they just this they built they designed them.

Another time we had an old fella come in and he was building a model ship he sailed on in World War Two.

And so when we found one, we found it.

He looked down, he said, Oh, that's the Dock to Like ship right there.

I said, well how did you know?

He said, Well, I was the owner of the Likes Alliance at one time, so I got a picture of him holding both models.

- What I love most about bringing people through the museum is that it helps me to keep my grandfather's memory alive, and I get the joy of being with him because when I come here, I see him in every room, and when I leave, I'll be saying goodbye, Grandpa.

I'll be back later.

And I enjoy that.

- It's been fun, and it was nice to see my dad smile.

- Well, that's about all the time we have for this show.

If you'd like information about anything you've seen, contact us at: or like the Mississippi Public Broadcasting Facebook page.

And check out our Mississippi Roads Facebook page while you're at it.

Till next time, I'm Walt Grayson, I'll be seeing you.

Mississippi roads.

Hi.

I'm Walt Grayson.

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