Moss Point

Cattle herders called this place Mossey Pen Point, a shady resting spot where they penned their herds among the moss-draped live oaks before driving them along the rivers. Over the years the name wore down, from Mossey Pen Point to Mossy Point, and at last to Moss Point. The oaks still stand where the Escatawpa and Pascagoula Rivers meet, on land first home to the Mohocti, and the water has carried the city's story ever since. Sawdust was in the air here a half century before the great lumber boom. Surveyor Thomas C. Rhodes, the namesake of Rhodes Bayou, opened one of the first sawmills on these banks in the 1830s, and the Beardslee and Bradford mill followed in 1836. In 1853 Walter Denny bought a Moss Point mill and built it into one of the leading operations on the river. Local histories tell how one early miller, William Griffin, dismantled his machinery during the Civil War and buried it deep in the Pascagoula swamp. When the war ended he dug it up, and Moss Point was sawing again almost before the smoke cleared. Beneath a stand of oaks on the edge of town lies Elder Cemetery, a burial ground that dates to the 1860s. A historical marker remembers the Elder family and the old Elder Ferry, and the earliest families laid to rest here, in the quiet shade of the oaks. Adam Blumer arrived in 1869 and set about building everything a mill town needed. With Lorin Hand he ran the Blumer and Hand Foundry, then added a tannery, a shoe factory, a grist mill, and a brickyard, and served stretches as the town's postmaster besides. Local histories add a glass works to the list, and tell of a fire in 1887 that melted it into a slag heap of translucent blue glass. For years afterward residents chipped off pieces for their gardens, and the blue glass still surfaces along old fence lines today. The Blumer Building on Main Street keeps the family name, down by the Riverwalk. First Missionary Baptist Church on Main Street, organized 1874, photographed before the 2023 tornado. Courtesy First Missionary Baptist Church. While Adam Blumer was busy building the town's businesses, Moss Point's families were building something made to last even longer. In the years after the Civil War, Moss Point's Black families worshiped together at Saint Paul Methodist, a one room church so central to life here that folks knew it simply as the Community Church. Out of that congregation, on September 20, 1874, eight members, five women and three men, organized the First Baptist Church. It grew right along with the town, raising a sanctuary on Main Street in 1902 and a brick one in 1956, its rolls carrying more than eight hundred names by midcentury. These churches did far more than hold services. Alongside congregations like Second Baptist, they raised up schools, choirs, and leaders. And when this city's hardest chapters came, it would be these same churches, time and again, that opened their doors first. That story was still to come. For decades Moss Point was the largest pine lumber export center in the country, better known in the ports of Europe and South America than in much of America itself. The L.N. Dantzler Lumber Company ran its sawmill on the Escatawpa from 1885 and grew into the largest exporter in Mississippi, with as many as nine sawmills inside the city and twelve along the river within a single mile. A Moss Point sawmill, its tramway running out through the stacked lumber. The steamer Honduras of Duluth loads ties at the Moss Point waterfront. Sailing ships at the Moss Point waterfront, masts standing thick along the river. Before the highways, the rivers were the highway. The Moss Point waterfront stayed crowded with schooners and steamers, masts standing thick along the banks, waiting to carry the city's lumber to ports in Europe and South America. The whole economy floated on this water. In the 1890s Main Street was a wide dirt road lined with wood front stores and board sidewalks, horses and wagons working the ruts between them. It w