Ocean Springs

Resort town in Jackson County, southeastern Mississippi, USA, on the east side of Biloxi Bay; population (1990) 14,700. It has developed as an artists' colony. The town developed around the site of Old Biloxi, where Fort Maurepas, the first permanent European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley, was established by the French in 1699.

Ocean Springs was named in 1854 by Dr George Austin, who established a sanitorium here. Primarily a fishing village until the 1880s, it then grew as a popular Gulf Coast resort.