Joseph La Pointe

Joseph Simon de La Pointe, born around 1670 and passed away in 1751, was the first European to settle in the Pascagoula area. He set out on a bold adventure, sailing alongside Iberville as an admiral on his first trip to “The New World” in 1699.

His father, Hubert Simon, came to Canada from France in 1656. Hubert’s father-in-law, Robert de La Mothe, held an important position as First Sergeant of The Guards, the bodyguards of the King of France.

Joseph was one of the earliest settlers to arrive in 1699 with Iberville and Bienville. This close connection was because Joseph’s father, along with Iberville and Bienville’s father, had made a fortune in the fur trade in Canada.

Joseph had four children from his first marriage, the youngest being Marie Josephe LaPointe.

Marie Josephe, born in 1720, married a German immigrant named Hugo Ernestus Krebs around 1730, who settled in Pascagoula.

Hugo Krebs became a prosperous plantation owner, inheriting much of La Pointe’s land when Joseph LaPointe retired and returned to La Rochelle, France.

Under Hugo Krebs’s ownership, the LaPointe Plantation thrived, producing crops like rice, cotton, indigo, sugar cane, and wax myrtle. When Hugo’s first wife, Marie Josephe, passed away, he remarried Marie Ann Chauvin de Joyeuse from the Illinois area of the Louisiana Territory.

From Hugo Krebs’s second wife, Marie de Joyeuse, comes their daughter Anna Charite Krebs.

Anna Krebs later married Francois Dubuisson.