French Establish First Settlemen

Represented on maps as early as 1507, the Gulf of Mexico inlet now known as Mobile Bay was navigated by European seafarers in 1519 when ships under the command of Spanish Admiral Alonso Alvaraz de Pineda sought a safe harbor in which to undertake repairs. The bay area was not really explored, however, until 1558. It was included in the vast region that was claimed for France's King Louis XIV and was named Louisiana by French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle in 1682. France authorized two brothers, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, to explore territories in Louisiana, and they arrived at the gulf inlet that is now called Mobile Bay in 1699. The area was subsequently considered crucial to establishing French occupation of Louisiana and the brothers were ordered to colonize the region, which was inhabited by the Mobile, or Maubila, tribe. In 1702 Bienville established Fort Louis de la Mobile—named to honor France's king and to acknowledge the native tribe—at Twenty Seven Mile Bluff on the banks of the Mobile River, just north of present-day Mobile. It was the first French town in the gulf region.
The settlement, which consisted of the log fort, Creole houses, a church, a hospital, a marketplace with shops, and a well, served as the capital of the vast Louisiana Territory. Women joined the community in 1704. When river flooding forced the colony to abandon Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1711, the settlement's four hundred inhabitants moved downstream to a new site protected by a wooden fort at the river's mouth on Mobile Bay. During this era, pelts, furs, wax, and tallow were transported down river to where the bay meets the gulf for transfer to ocean-going vessels. This settlement retained the name Mobile and remained the capital of the Louisiana Territory until New Orleans assumed that title in 1720. That same year Mobile renamed its fort Fort Conde. A brick structure later replaced the original fort.