They hired Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, to create an open campus with no walls, vast gardens and thousands of palm and Coast Live Oak trees, and California mission-inspired sandstone buildings with red-tiled roofs.
Enter Marlin Miller, a wood sculptor from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, who volunteered to create a few live oak sculptures for free -- in part to leave his artistic mark on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but also as a service to the community.