Photo courtesy of Errol Bradley.
John Guilhot, the "Hermit of Deer Island"
John Guilhot, the "Hermit of Deer Island" was a memorable character along the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the 1950s.
It has been decades since John (Jean) Guilhot walked this earth, but folks in Biloxi have not forgotten the singing Frenchman. Some pronounce his name Gee-yo. Others say Gil-heart. But most simply refer to him as the “Hermit of Deer Island.”
To understand the hermit, it’s important to first understand Deer Island. One of several small islands off the coast of Mississippi, historians say that it was occupied and used for hunting as early as 8,000 B.C. Artifacts from four major periods have been found on the island and indicate the largest occupation occurred from about 1220 A.D. to 1550 A.D.
French settlers arrived along the Gulf Coast and Deer Island in 1699 and coexisted with a small tribe of Native Americans, the Capinans, who retired from the Pascagoula River to the island. The 1850 census lists eleven people living there, representing three families and one single man.
As recently as the early twentieth century, around eighteen families inhabited Deer Island. Alvin Baker, 83, who currently resides in Biloxi, was born and raised there. One of five boys, Baker described his childhood as a simple, but happy life. The family grew most of their fruits and vegetables in the once-rich soil. They were almost entirely self-sufficient, thriving on the fish they caught, the game they hunted, and the hogs and cattle they raised.
The moniker “Hermit of Deer Island” came from a Biloxi boat designer and builder, Louis Gorenflo, who during the 1950s was capitalizing off the growing tourist market in Biloxi by taking visitors out on fishing trips and schooner rides and educating them on the Gulf Coast shrimp and oyster industries. And sometimes he told them the story of the Hermit of Deer Island.
In 1915, the Deer Island Improvement Company purchased land on the island to create an amusement park. The park had a dance pavilion, row boat rentals, carnival rides, a penny arcade, and daily concerts. “They also built a movie theatre,” said Baker. "A family from Illinois moved down to run the movie projectors. One of the daughters was Pauline Lemien, the seventh and final wife of Jean Guilhot, who met her shortly after arriving on the Gulf Coast in 1920.
“I heard he immigrated to the United States from France and came up through Key West,” said Baker. “He worked at a turtle factory, where they captured and processed turtles for turtle soup and such. He then moved to northern Florida where he worked on an orange plantation, then to Foley, Alabama to work on a watermelon farm. He left his wife and three kids there to move to Biloxi, where he worked as a barber.”
Baker said that when Guilhot moved to Deer Island to make his home with Pauline, he was working in the oyster business. After she died in 1933, he stayed on the island, tending to his oyster reefs. “I remember the hurricane of 1947,” says Baker. “Everyone was sure Guilhot had drowned. I was just six years old, but I remember he walked out of the woods and everyone yelled ‘he’s alive!’”
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After the storm, many families left Deer Island. Guilhot’s home was badly damaged. “I know his house burned to the ground at some point,” said Baker. “He ended up building a small hut using pieces of driftwood on the former concrete pad for the amusement park. About that time he began his self-imposed isolation.”
The moniker “Hermit of Deer Island” came from a Biloxi boat designer and builder, Louis Gorenflo, who during the 1950s was capitalizing off the growing tourist market in Biloxi by taking visitors out on fishing trips and schooner rides and educating them on the Gulf Coast shrimp and oyster industries. And sometimes he told them the story of the Hermit of Deer Island.
Though he was always scanning the Deer Island coastline for him, Gorenflo couldn’t manage to get a sighting of Guilhot. One day, he poked a stick in the sand on the island’s beach and attached a bag with a newspaper and food for the hermit. He returned again and again for weeks, and each time Guilhot got a little closer. “I think Guilhot was embarrassed to be seen by people because his clothes were tattered and he had long hair and a beard,” said Baker. “But that was what Gorenflo liked about him. It perpetuated the story of a hermit living on the island, which was exciting for the tourists.”
Baker said it took about six months, but Gorenflo finally established enough trust with Guilhot, regularly providing him with provisions and new clothes, that the hermit began rowing out to actually greet the tour boat. He would entertain the passengers by singing French songs in his resonating baritone, and the passengers would throw coins into his skiff. Tourist shops sold postcards with Guilhot’s scraggly image, which further fueled an exciting fear of the hermit.
When Gorenflo died, Guilhot resumed his relative isolation. “He got a couple of dogs to keep him company,” recalled Baker. “That soon turned into more dogs, and before we knew it, he had up to fifty dogs that ran up and down the beach. Guilhot said they were friendly dogs, but my dad was concerned they would hurt people.”
Guilhot was known to pop in at the Baker home, where he would frequently break into such deafening songs the windows would rattle. “I heard all kinds of stories about Guilhot over the years,” said Errol Bradley, a one-time Biloxi Citizen of the Year. “Things like he was a convicted felon, and that he lived all alone. But then I also heard stories of him rowing his boat to the Coon Street pier and riding the bus into downtown Biloxi to shop. If I was a hermit, that’s the kind of hermit I’d like to be.”
After living on Deer Island for 38 years, Guilhot reluctantly moved onto the mainland when he was no longer able to care for himself. He was taken into the Lamien residence, the home of his step-grandsons, where he spent the last year of his life. The Hermit of Deer Island passed away the next year, in 1959, at the age of 81.
“I went to the Old Biloxi cemetery one day and saw that his headstone was a piece of wood, unmarked really, except for someone had written ‘Hermit of Deer Island,’” said Bradley. It is believed the headstone was washed away by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As chairman of the culture and heritage committee of the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce, Bradley headed up a 2013 project to replace it with a substantial black granite grave marker, complete with a summary Guilhot’s life story and engraved with his face. He took a crew to Deer Island to gather oyster shells from Guilhot’s island home and crushed them to embed in the concrete of the coping on the base of the marker. “He deserves to be remembered. He was a main attraction on the Coast for many years,” he said.
