Moss Point, MS news and local guide

Lumber built the town. In the 1830s surveyor Thomas C. Rhodes opened one of the first sawmills, for whom Rhodes Bayou is named, and the Beardslee and Bradford mill followed in 1836. Walter Denny bought a mill in 1853, and during the Civil War William Griffin hid his mill machinery in the swamp and dug it up afterward. After the war several Black Union veterans settled here, among them Solomon Denny, who was born into slavery and made his way to Ship Island to join the Union Navy; renamed Gregory, he ran the Denny sawmill so well that people called it "Sol's Mill." Adam Blumer arrived in 1869 and ran a foundry, tannery, shoe factory and brickyard, and the L. N. Dantzler Lumber Company opened a mill on the Escatawpa in 1885. At its peak Moss Point had as many as nine sawmills and was a leading exporter of longleaf yellow pine. With more than 3,000 residents, Moss Point was incorporated directly as a city in 1901, the only Mississippi city to skip the village and town stages; Charles H. Wood was its first mayor. Fires struck downtown on March 17, 1912, and again in 1923. The Southern Paper Company mill opened in 1913, later joined by International Paper, and its color gave Kreole Kraft paper and the Kreole community their name; the mills closed in 2001. Moss Point was a center of Freedom Summer in 1964, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited that August. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded downtown and damaged nearly half the city's homes. Sources City of Moss Point: History Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area: Moss Point The Historical Marker Database: Black Union Sailors Settled in Moss Point (Jackson County Historical and Genealogical Society)