A complete text version of the narration. Play it in full, or choose "Start in 1901" to begin when Moss Point became a city.
Alternate opening (Start in 1901)
Welcome to Moss Point, Mississippi, the town the Gulf Coast has always called the River City. This is the shorter way into the story, and it picks up at the moment Moss Point truly became a city. First, though, a quick word on how it got here. For most of the eighteen hundreds, this was a mill town down where the two rivers meet. Its sawmills made it the largest pine lumber export center in the whole country, with a waterfront crowded by tall ships bound for Europe and South America. By the turn of the century, the little mill town had outgrown its britches.
1. The Story of Moss Point
Welcome to Moss Point, Mississippi, the town folks along the Gulf Coast have always called the River City. For the next little while, just sit back and listen. The page is going to carry you down the timeline all on its own, from the moss draped oaks that gave this place its name, to a city that's outlasted fire, flood, and storm, and never once stayed down. If you want to pause, skip ahead, or step out of the tour, the controls are waiting at the bottom of your screen. So let's start where this story has always started, down where the two rivers meet.
2. Named for the oaks
Long before there was a city here, there were the oaks. Cattle herders moving their animals along the rivers knew this bend as Mossey Pen Point, a shady resting spot where they could pen their herds under live oaks hung heavy with Spanish moss. And over the years, the name wore down the way river stones do. Mossey Pen Point became Mossy Point, and Mossy Point, at last, became Moss Point. Those same oaks are still standing today, out where the two rivers meet, on land that was first home to the Mohocti people. And from that day to this one, it's the water that has carried this city's story.
3. The first mills
It opens with sawdust. Half a century before the great lumber boom, sawdust was already drifting through the air here. Back in the 1830s, a surveyor named Thomas C. Rhodes, the same man Rhodes Bayou is named for, opened one of the first sawmills on these banks. The Beardslee and Bradford mill followed in 1836, and in 1853 Walter Denny bought a mill here and built it into one of the leading operations on the river. Now, local histories tell of one early miller, William Griffin, who took his machinery apart during the Civil War and buried it deep in the river swamp, and when the war ended, he dug it back up, and had Moss Point sawing lumber again almost before the smoke had cleared.
4. Elder Cemetery
The war left quieter marks here too. Beneath a stand of oaks on the edge of town lies Elder Cemetery, a burial ground that goes back to the 1860s. A historical marker there remembers the Elder family, the old Elder Ferry, and the earliest families ever laid to rest in this place. It keeps that memory the way this town keeps most things, in the quiet shade of the oaks.
5. The man who made everything
Not every arrival came to rest. In 1869, a man named Adam Blumer came to town and set about building nearly everything a mill town could need, a foundry with Lorin Hand, a tannery, a shoe factory, a grist mill, even a brickyard, and he found time to serve as postmaster besides. Local histories add a glass works to that list, and they tell of a fire in 1887 that melted it down into a heap of translucent blue glass. For years afterward, folks chipped off pieces for their gardens, and that blue glass still turns up along the old fence lines today. The Blumer Building on Main Street still carries his name, right down by the Riverwalk.
6. Built on longleaf pine
The mill town did not stay little for long. For decades, Moss Point was the largest pine lumber export center in the whole country, better known in the ports of Europe and South America than it was in most of America itself. The Dantzler Lumber Company ran its sawmill on the Escatawpa from 1885 and grew into the largest exporter in Mississippi. At the peak of it all, there were as many as nine sawmills running inside the city, and twelve along a single mile of river.
7. A harbor full of sail
Of course, all that lumber had to reach the world somehow, and before the highways, the rivers were the highway. The Moss Point waterfront stayed crowded with schooners and steamers, their masts standing thick along the banks, waiting to carry the city's lumber across the ocean. The whole economy floated on this water.
8. The boy who won the Derby
The river raised some remarkable people too. By several accounts, a jockey named Lonnie Clayton was born right here in 1876, back when the town still went by Mossy Point. In 1892, at just fifteen years old, he rode a colt named Azra to victory in the Kentucky Derby, and to this day, he's remembered as the youngest jockey ever to win it.
9. The street takes shape
While the river did the heavy lifting, the town itself was just taking shape. In the 1890s, Main Street was still a wide dirt road, lined with wood front stores and board sidewalks, with horses and wagons working the ruts in between. But it was already the center of things, years before brick blocks and a bank would give the district its weight.
10. Main Street rises
That weight came quickly. Cowan's General Merchandise set up along the unpaved street. Burnham's Drug Store opened in 1902, and believe it or not, it's still filling prescriptions today, more than a hundred and twenty years later. A national bank anchored the corner of Main and Post Office streets, and just down the block, J. H. Hill's Sugar Bowl sold fresh candy and cold drinks, with a bowling alley out back if you had a game in you.
11. A city, not a town
By then, this place was growing too fast to wait its turn. Most towns become cities in stages, but in 1901, Moss Point skipped the line and incorporated directly as a city, the only place in Mississippi ever to do it without first being a village or a town. More than three thousand people were already here.
12. The Finns of Kreole
New neighbors kept arriving, some of them from a very long way off. Around the turn of the century, Gideon Laine and his Finnish Land Company drew Finnish families down from the upper Midwest to the city's eastern edge, to a settlement first known simply as Laine. In 1907, they finished the Finnish Lutheran Church of Kreole, built on land that Laine gave, and it anchored that community for nearly eighty years. Later on, when the paper mill's tan kraft paper was branded Kreole Kraft for its creole color, the name stuck, first to the railroad station, and then to the neighborhood itself.
13. The town team
A young city needs more than work though, it needs its Saturdays. A few years after incorporation, Moss Point fielded a ball team good enough to call themselves the winners of 1908, and the players gathered for a photograph in front of the backstop at Beardslee's Green, townsmen and a couple of professors among them. It was exactly the kind of afternoon that knits a young city together.
14. Central High
Those same years were building more than ballplayers. In 1908, Central High School opened its doors, a proud three story brick building that would teach the town's children for generations.
15. Paved with its own promise
The young city was learning to carry itself like a grown one. Nine years after incorporation, Moss Point paved its streets the way the big cities did, by selling bonds. The Street Improvement Bonds of 1910 paid four and a half percent interest, with coupons payable at a bank in New York City. A handful of those coupons still survive, every one punched through the center, the mark left when the city paid each one back. Moss Point paid every penny it promised.
16. Paper and brick
When the great pine forests began to thin, Moss Point kept right on working. The Southern Paper Company mill rose on the riverbank in 1913, joined International Paper in 1928, and made paper here for the better part of a century. The mill had company too, with factories pressing the local river clay into brick.
17. The whole town turned out
When the first World War reached the coast, Moss Point answered in white. The local Red Cross chapter, women and children together beneath the flags, organized relief and rolled bandages for the boys at the front. The photograph they left behind is one of the oldest group portraits the city keeps, and it shows you a place that has always shown up for its own.
18. The Pine Knot Special
The city's iron ran on rails as well as rivers. The line between the twin cities had run since 1895, and after 1902 the Denny lumber firm pushed it deep into the timber country. A railroad once so lean it burned pine knots for fuel took the name Mississippi Export Railroad in 1922, and made its headquarters right here in Moss Point.
19. The Great Fire
Then came the hardest day the young city had ever seen. In 1923, a great fire swept through the heart of Moss Point, tearing across the downtown business district and the homes around it, burning until only the brick chimneys still stood against the sky. Within a couple of years, new brick storefronts had risen on the same ground, and Main Street was open for business again.
20. The Battle of the Cats begins
Two years later, with the ash barely cleared, Moss Point picked a new kind of fight, the Friday night kind. The city fielded its first football team in 1925, and promptly lost its first meeting with Passcagoola by six touchdowns. The rivalry that grew between the Tigers and the Panthers, the Battle of the Cats, ran so hot that after the 1933 game, the two schools called the whole thing off for fifteen years.
21. Magnolia Elementary
The city kept building, and not just for some of its children. In 1932, Moss Point raised Magnolia Elementary, the first brick school for African American children anywhere in the state of Mississippi. Both schools are gone now, but what they taught never left.
22. The street at full stride
Downtown never broke stride, even through the hardest decade in American memory. By the 1930s, Main Street was paved and busy, cars angled in at the curb in front of the drug store and the five and dime, and Highway 63 ran straight through the middle of a downtown at the very height of its trade.
23. Miss Mississippi goes to Atlantic City
In fact, those streets had their own claim to fame that decade. In August of 1933, a young Moss Point schoolteacher named Dorothy Eley, the daughter of the town physician, won a statewide contest down in Biloxi and carried the title of Miss Mississippi all the way to the national pageant in Atlantic City, where she placed among the semifinalists. Now, the official Miss Mississippi line begins the following year, so the record books start without her. But her hometown never needed convincing. She taught school here for decades, and when she passed in 2005, her obituary said it plainly. She was the first Miss Mississippi.
24. Lovers Lane
Not all of the town's treasures ever made the record books. For generations, a tunnel of live oaks arched right over Griffin Street, and everyone in Moss Point simply knew that stretch as Lovers Lane. Couples courted in its shade, and folks here have long called it one of the prettiest spots on the coast.
25. When Elvis came to the shipyard
Then the war came, and the quiet didn't last. The Second World War swelled the twin cities with shipyard workers until every spare room, trailer, and tent had a tenant. And as the story goes, a boy named Elvis Presley spent a short, hot stretch of that decade here on the coast, while his father Vernon took work building boats at the Moss Point shipyard. The pay was steady, the summer was brutal, and before long the Presleys packed up for home. The boy grew up to be the most famous voice in America. And the coast kept the story for itself.
26. The municipal pool
After the war, summer came back, and for a whole generation, summer in Moss Point meant the municipal pool on the Escatawpa. It meant the high dive, the school bus parked at the fence, and a shrimp boat sliding past on the river just beyond the swimmers. The pool ran from 1946 into the early sixties, and for the kids who grew up here, it was the whole summer.
27. They bury the hatchet
Come fall, the town turned back to its oldest feud. The Battle of the Cats had sat silent for fifteen years, until 1948, when the rivalry finally returned to the field. Local lore says the two schools dug a grave at midfield that day and buried a hatchet in it at halftime. Moss Point won that night, twenty four to nothing, its first victory in the whole series.
28. The menhaden boats
Down on the river, a new kind of harvest was taking hold. In the 1950s, Omega Protein began working the menhaden, those small, oily fish, into meal and oil on the banks of the Escatawpa. The boats went out into the Gulf, and the shipyard in town built the very steamers that chased them.
29. The night the Joy went dark
Back up in town, when the day's work was done, the brightest lights on Main Street spelled out a single word. Joy. The Joy Theatre was the downtown picture show, its tall marquee rising over the storefronts with a Texaco station on the corner. It had burned once already, back in 1935, only months after it first opened, and the town built it right back the very next year. But on New Year's Eve of 1958, just an hour after the last show let out, fire took the Joy a second time. And this time, as folks here still tell it, it burned so hot that it cracked the windows of the restaurant across the street. The marquee never lit again. But ask anyone who grew up here, and they'll still tell you about the night the Joy went dark.
30. A blues tradition
Through all those working years, this city kept a soundtrack going. The Black community of Moss Point produced an extraordinary run of musicians, remembered today with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail along Main Street. Charles Fairley toured with Otis Redding. The Nelson brothers traveled with the great shows. And generation after generation came up through the Magnolia High Monarchs band.
31. Freedom Summer on the river
In 1964, voices rose here that would carry far beyond the coast. Moss Point became an active organizing ground for the civil rights movement. A Freedom School opened on July first at Second Baptist Church. Five days later, gunfire at a mass meeting wounded seventeen year old Jessie Mae Stallworth. Stokely Carmichael came that July, Doctor Martin Luther King Junior visited that August, and by the end of the summer, the movement here had gathered roughly twelve hundred Freedom Democratic Party registration forms.
32. Main Street in color
Through all of it, downtown stayed the gathering place. Within living memory, Main Street still pulled the whole town in, cars angled at the curb, the Rexall drug store on the corner, awnings rolled out against the coast sun. It's the Moss Point a lot of people still picture when they think of home.
33. Toni Seawright makes history
In 1987, the whole town was watching one of its own on the biggest stage in America. Toni Seawright grew up in Moss Point, was homecoming queen at Moss Point High, and became the first African American to earn a music degree at Mississippi University for Women. On July eighteenth, 1987, she was crowned Miss Mississippi in Vicksburg, the first African American woman ever to hold the title. Her hometown cheered her all the way to Atlantic City, where she finished fourth runner up at Miss America. She went on to tour in The Wiz, perform on Broadway, and appear on Nickelodeon alongside her own son.
34. A Tiger dynasty
The town had a champion's habit by then. Out on the football field, the Tigers turned that old rivalry's grit into a dynasty, bringing home five state championships between 1983 and the year 2000, the last four of them under coach Jerry Alexander, whose name is on the field at Dantzler Stadium today.
35. The water came
This city has always known that the water gives, and the water takes. On the morning of August twenty ninth, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore at the Louisiana line and put Moss Point in its strongest quadrant. The surge drove the rivers backward into town. Downtown flooded. Water rose into City Hall itself. Nearly half the homes in the city were damaged, and twelve lives were lost across Jackson County. On a coast that had already endured Camille, this was the storm all others would be measured against. But church crews and volunteers arrived almost before the water fell, and they were still coming years later, carrying families back into their homes.
36. It always rebuilds
Eighteen years later, the test came from the sky instead of the sea. On the afternoon of June nineteenth, 2023, an EF 2 tornado dropped out of a summer storm and cut more than two miles through the heart of town with winds near a hundred and thirty miles an hour. It stripped the roofs from the bank and the church on Main Street, and lifted the gym roof off the high school while students sheltered inside. More than three hundred homes and businesses were damaged, and not one life was lost. Then the town filled up with helpers, more than fourteen hundred volunteers in the first year alone, among them Amish crews who stayed four months, raising new homes where the storm had passed. Moss Point rebuilds. It always has.
37. Still a working river city
Moss Point has always been a working town, and it still is. On the Escatawpa, the menhaden boats still run, one of the city's oldest industries and the longest still going. The Mississippi Export Railroad, headquartered in Moss Point for more than a century, still hauls freight along the line it laid. And next to Trent Lott International Airport, Northrop Grumman builds advanced aerospace and unmanned systems, a whole new industry grown up on the edge of town.
38. The city you can visit now
Moss Point isn't only a place to do business, it's a place to spend a day. Downtown is small and walkable, the kind of Main Street where you park once and stroll past the local shops and the old drugstore, with a shaded plaza, string lights, and a boardwalk reaching right out over the Escatawpa. There's a park for nearly every neighborhood now, with splash pads, walking trails, and ball courts. And the best way to see the city is still from the water, out on the marsh and the slow bends of the Singing River. The calendar stays full too, with the River Jamboree every May, classic cars cruising the riverfront each fall, and a lighted boat parade every Christmas.
39. Building what comes next
Which brings us to what comes next. Moss Point isn't only proud of where it's been, it's busy building where it's going. Down on the water, there are plans for a new riverfront district. Along Interstate 10, a fresh mile of commercial frontage is set to break ground. New dealerships and a travel center are rising on Highway 63, and the old paper mill site, quiet since 2001, is being cleared for the next big employer, with new housing to go with it. Mayor Billy Knight Senior was elected in 2021, and in 2025 the people of Moss Point returned him to office with ninety three percent of the vote, the first mayor in decades to win a second term. For a town that has rebuilt itself again and again, the next chapter is one it finally gets to plan, not just survive.
40. Proud of its past, building its future
That's the story of Moss Point, named for its moss, shaped by its rivers, and rebuilt, more than once, by its own people. Thank you for following the timeline all the way down to today. Come see the rest of it in person.
