Last Night at the Fort, a Corn Maze in Kiln, and No Rain in Sight

Good Thursday morning from The Seawall.

The summer concert series ends Friday, the corn maze opens Saturday, and the weather is on your side for both.

Friday night is the last Fridays at the Fort of 2026 — free music on the beach at Fort Maurepas in Ocean Springs, six to nine, the fifth and final date of a series that started May 29. Saturday morning the corn maze opens at Southern Promiseland Farm in Kiln. Saturday night, in the same town, Chris Cagle closes out the Hancock County Fair.

In between: East Biloxi throws itself a festival at John Henry Beck Park, Diamondhead paddles four miles of Paradise Bayou, a new handmade market in Bay St. Louis cuts its ribbon, and a nineteen-year-old named Harrell Davenport plays blues guitar and harmonica at Ground Zero.

And for once, the forecast is the good news. No rain in it Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Highs in the mid-eighties after a week in the low nineties, and a Friday night that drops to 70.

Full guide below — plus an 1870 house in Moss Point with a fireplace in both bedrooms and a flood zone you'll actually like, and a 58-pound hound at the Gulfport shelter named Meridith.

Nobody on this coast believes the calendar about fall. We believe the first evening you walk out to the car and the air doesn't land on you like a wet towel. For a lot of us, that's Friday. The low is seventy. Go sit outside somewhere and let it happen.

Friday: Sunny. High near 86. Northeast wind around 10 mph. Mostly clear overnight, low around 70.

Saturday: Mostly sunny. High near 86. Northeast wind 5 to 10 becoming southeast in the afternoon. Mostly cloudy overnight, low around 72.

Sunday: Mostly sunny. High near 88 — the warmest of the three. North wind 5 to 10 becoming south in the afternoon.

Bottom line: three dry days, and the first weekend in a while where the heat isn't the thing you plan around. Everything outdoors in this issue — the fair, the fort, the paddle, the festival in East Biloxi, the corn maze — works all three days without a rain plan. Friday and Saturday are the cooler two; Sunday is the one to bring water for.

In the tropics: nothing in the Gulf, and the Hurricane Center expects no tropical development anywhere in the Atlantic over the next seven days. The one named storm out there, Fay, is several hundred miles southwest of the Azores — the far side of the ocean.

🏘 Resilient East Biloxi Festival · John Henry Beck Park, Biloxi · Sat Sept 26, 10 AM–2 PM

A community festival for "the people, history, and spirit of East Biloxi," out of the Resilient East Biloxi program with MSU Coastal Extension. A neighborhood celebrating itself in its own park. Go early, eat something, meet somebody.

🏺 Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art · Center for Ceramics, Biloxi · Fri–Sat

Raku Night Friday 6–9 ($75) — the firing where the pots come out of the kiln glowing and go straight into a can of combustibles. Saturday: Intro to Etching 10–1 ($90) and a Ceramic Jack O'Lantern class 1–3 ($48). George Ohr would approve of the pumpkin.

⛵ "Memories & Mimosas with a Master" · Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum, 115 E. 1st St, Biloxi · Sat Sept 26, 11 AM–2 PM · $100

Jason Pittman teaches a painting — this month's is "Sailboat Serenity" — with brunch, mimosas and supplies included. Reserve at (228) 435-6320.

👻 Terror on the Coast · Gulfport · Fri & Sat, doors 6 PM, show and haunt 7, close 11 · $25 GA / $35 Fast FEAR

Indoor, so the weather is irrelevant, which is the point of a haunted house anyway.

🧚 7th Annual Faery Court Ball — "Court of Anubis and the Undead" · 13280 Shriners Blvd, Biloxi · Sat Sept 26, 8 PM–1 AM · $99 GA / $159 VIP · 18+

A fantasy costume ball. Fantasy, Egyptian or formal attire is required, not suggested. We are not qualified to advise on the dress code, but we respect anyone who is.

🎡 11th Annual Hancock County Fair · Hancock County Fairgrounds, 4184 Kiln-Delisle Rd, Kiln · through Sat Sept 26

The last nights of the fair: rides, the midway, crafts, a rodeo and live music. Chris Cagle plays Saturday at 8. Wayne Toups is on the bill too. ⚠️ The fair's site doesn't publish gate times, prices or which night Toups plays. Check their page before you load up the car.

🛶 Paddle Paradise · Diamondhead Marina, 3410 Yacht Club Circle · Sat Sept 26, 8:30 AM · free

About four miles of kayak and paddleboard on Paradise Bayou, explicitly not a race. Life jackets required; register through the city first. Low of seventy the night before. This is the morning for it.

🧵 Longfellow Market — grand opening · 3168 Longfellow Dr, Bay St. Louis · Sat Sept 26, 9 AM–6 PM · free

A market for handmade and hand-finished goods. Hancock Chamber ribbon cutting at 10, an outdoor vendor market 9 to 2, and a shopper passport that gets you a free gift.

🌽 Southern Promiseland Farm opens for fall · 1212 Raygan Ln, Kiln · Sat Sept 26, 11 AM–8 PM

Corn maze, pumpkin patch, hayride and a play area, opening day of the season. ⚠️ WLOX says admission is free with activities priced separately; the farm's own site is years out of date. Confirm before you go.

🍤 Fall Festival at St. Clare · St. Clare Catholic Church, 236 S. Beach Blvd, Waveland · Sat Sept 26, 10 AM–2 PM · free

An old-fashioned fall festival hosted by the Waveland Police Department for National Night Out — hayrides, kids' games, free pizza for kids, and $10 seafood plates.

🎶 Fridays at the Fort — season finale · Fort Maurepas, Ocean Springs · Fri Sept 25, 6–9 PM · free

Live music, food trucks, the beach. Last one until next spring. ⚠️ The band hasn't been announced; the Chamber posts it on Facebook. It doesn't matter much. You're going for the evening, not the setlist.

🎨 Celebrating the Resiliency & Cultural Legacy of the Mississippi Gulf Coast · Walter Anderson Museum of Art, 510 Washington Ave, Ocean Springs · Fri Sept 25 · free, RSVP requested

Cocktail hour with live music from Anderson Domingues 5:30–6:30, then a panel, "Preserving Gulf Coast Heritage," 6:30–7:30. Then walk down Washington Avenue to dinner.

🥬 Ocean Springs Fresh Market · 1000 Washington Ave · Sat 9 AM–1 PM, every Saturday, rain or shine

Jeffrey Osborne · IP Casino, Studio A, Biloxi · Fri Sept 25, 8 PM · Ticketmaster

"On the Wings of Love," "Stay With Me Tonight," and the voice from L.T.D. The only confirmed headliner on Casino Row all weekend. Under-21s must be with an adult 30 or older.

Chris Cagle · Hancock County Fair, Kiln · Sat Sept 26, 8 PM — see Hancock above.

Friday: Royal Horses Band, 7 PM, tickets from about $22 · then Fuego Latin Night with DJ Crazy Ivan, 10 PM–1 AM, $5 at ten, $10 at eleven, bachata class at ten. · Saturday: brunch with Will Coppage, 11–2, no cover · then ⭐ the Harrell "Young Rell" Davenport Band, 7–10, from about $22. · Sunday: brunch with Mike Halat, 11–2, no cover.

Friday — Will Coppage at Government Street Grocery, Ocean Springs, 9 PM. · Frets for Pets starts at The Juke Joint, 1911 Government St, Ocean Springs — three days of music benefiting animal shelters, through Sunday.

Saturday — Will Coppage again, at Jack's By The Tracks, 709 Krebs Ave, Pascagoula, 6 PM — his second show of the day and his third of the weekend. · Frets for Pets: Love Story's End, 7 PM.

Sunday — Open jam with 3hG at The Juke Joint, late.

Frets for Pets hasn't posted a full 2026 lineup, and The Shed's calendar and a listing site disagree about a Saturday show there, so call before you drive for a specific name. If you run a room on this coast, we'll print your dates free every week — we just have to have them.

Beau Rivage Theatre (Back 2 Mac, Oct 7). The Biloxi Saenger (Zach Rushing, Oct 23–24). Hard Rock Live. Murky Waters (Michael Vincent Band, Oct 3). Levitt AMP Moss Point (back Oct 3). Treasure Bay, still "Entertainment will return."

The Harrell "Young Rell" Davenport Band, Saturday at 7, Ground Zero.

Jeffrey Osborne is the bigger name and Chris Cagle will have the bigger crowd. But the show you'll talk about is a nineteen-year-old who plays guitar and harmonica, in a blues room built for exactly that, on a night that's headed for the low seventies. You don't get to see many players at nineteen. You get to say you did.

Venue owners and bands: send your weekend dates to [email protected] by Tuesday noon and we'll print them free.

A correction, and a good season. Last week's issue reached you Friday instead of Thursday — our fault — and the Shuckers note inside it still said Game 2 was "tonight." Tonight had been Thursday. Here's how it actually went: Biloxi won it, advanced to the Southern League Championship Series and took the South for the first time since 2019. They lost Game 1 at home 5–4, then stayed alive Tuesday in North Alabama behind a shutout and a franchise-record-tying twelve strikeouts from Bishop Letson. Wednesday night they fell 3–1 in Game 3, and Rocket City took the title. One game short, after the best Biloxi season in seven years. Worth standing up for.

🦪 The oyster reefs are coming back, and the season opens early. The Department of Marine Resources estimates the surveyed reefs hold nearly 400,000 sacks this year, up from about 275,000 last year, after crews spread limestone and shell across 236 acres this summer. The commercial season opens Thursday, Oct 1 — nearly two weeks earlier than last year. (WXXV)

Freddie Mac PMMS, week of Sept 17: 30-year fixed 6.95% · 15-year fixed 6.26% (Freddie Mac)

That's the fourth straight weekly rise — 6.66, 6.71, 6.76, now 6.95 — and the last step was the big one, nineteen basis points in a week. A year ago the thirty-year was 6.26%.

Here's what nineteen basis points is in real money. On a $300,000 loan, the move from 6.76% to 6.95% adds about $38 a month to principal and interest, which is roughly $13,700 over thirty years. Not a catastrophe. Not nothing.

And here's the number that matters more than the weekly wiggle. This week's House of the Week is $375,000. Put twenty percent down and you're borrowing $300,000. On a thirty-year at this week's rate, principal and interest run about $1,986 a month and you'll pay about $415,000 in interest over the life of the loan. On a fifteen-year at 6.26%, the payment is about $2,574 — six hundred dollars more a month — and the interest is about $163,000. Same house. A quarter of a million dollars apart. (Principal and interest only; taxes and insurance are on top. Arithmetic ours.)

That's the whole argument for the fifteen-year, and it's why I'd rather help you buy a house you can carry on one than stretch into a house you can only carry on thirty.

🏠 If you're thinking about selling. The number in your head for your house is probably from 2022. Let me build you a home value report on your actual address — a real comparative market analysis out of the MLS: what's active near you, what's pending, and what has actually closed in the last five months. Free, no obligation.

🔑 If you're thinking about buying. I can represent you on any home on this coast, including this week's House of the Week, which is not my listing. And before we go looking, we run your numbers — I'm a Ramsey-trained financial coach and I've led Financial Peace University classes at my church in Ocean Springs, so I'd rather tell you honestly what you can carry than help you buy a payment that eats you alive.

Either way you're talking to me, not a call center. Reply to this email or call or text 228-325-1502.

— Rob

Robert Recio · Licensed Real Estate Salesperson, MS #S-62221 · REAL Broker, LLC · Serving Hancock, Harrison & Jackson counties. House of the Week is a market feature, not our own listing unless noted. Equal Housing Opportunity.

No. "As-is" doesn't mean you can't look — it means the seller has told you up front they won't fix what you find. So you'd better find it.

Start with what "as-is" usually means in practice: the seller isn't going to negotiate a repair list. It is not a promise that nothing's wrong, and it doesn't take away your right to inspect. Keep your inspection period, use every day of it, and go in expecting to walk away if the numbers tell you to. That's not pessimism. That's the deal the seller offered you.

With an old house, the inspection that matters is the part nobody can see from the porch. The roof. The wiring — older houses can still have original circuits somewhere, and some insurers won't write a policy on certain older wiring at all. The plumbing, and especially the drain line out to the street; a camera scope doesn't cost much and can save you a trench across the yard. And what's under the floor: the piers, the sills, and whether anything has been eating them.

Then do the step most buyers skip: get a homeowners and wind insurance quote on that specific address before your inspection period ends, not the week before closing. On this coast, an old roof or old wiring can change the price of insurance — or whether a company will write it — more than it changes the price of the house. The quote is free. Finding out at the closing table is not.

The old houses still standing on this coast have outlasted a lot. Your job is to find out which parts of this one have been doing the outlasting lately.

3807 Dantzler St, Moss Point

It was built in 1870, which makes it a hundred and fifty-six years old, and it is on a street in West Moss Point the listing describes as lined with massive oaks.

What you get for that: a ten-foot-wide front porch, twelve-foot ceilings, a center-hall foyer, crown molding and the original doors and transoms. Fireplaces in the living room, the dining room and both bedrooms. A butler's pantry. A den paneled in knotty pine. The listing says the house is tongue-and-groove cypress. There's a screened back porch with a lift, a three-car garage and carriage house, and a floored walk-up attic with room for two more rooms if you want them.

The odd part is the layout: two bedrooms, three full baths, across 2,742 square feet. That's a house built for a way of living nobody lives anymore, which is exactly why somebody should.

It's being sold as-is — see this week's Reader Question, which is not a coincidence — and at $375,000 it works out to about $137 a square foot for a house that has watched the Coast go from sail to shipyard.

And the part the listing doesn't mention. No listing on this house names a flood zone, so we pulled it ourselves from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer: 3807 Dantzler St sits in Zone X — "area of minimal flood hazard." That's the good one: outside the special flood hazard area, so a federally backed lender won't require flood insurance — though it's still worth pricing. After last week's Zone VE in Diamondhead, it's worth saying plainly: this is what the other end of the scale looks like. (FEMA NFHL, FIRM panel 28059C0341G, effective 2009. That's the mapped zone for the location, not a surveyed determination; Zone X doesn't mean zero risk, and an elevation certificate settles it.)

The numbers: $375,000 · 2 bed / 3 bath · 2,742 sq ft · about 0.8 acre · built 1870 · listed Aug 31, 2026 · MLS 4161010 · FEMA Zone X

Listed by Betty Cobb · Coldwell Banker Smith Homes, Realtors

Meridith

She's a two-year-old hound mix, black and tan, 58 pounds, and the shelter's own description of her is better than anything we'd write: "a heart as big as her floppy ears… the perfect mix of cuddle buddy and adventure partner." Heartworm negative. Her favorite thing, per the people who see her every day, is being close to her people and collecting every pet and belly rub on offer.

She's built for this exact weekend. The shelter pitches her for hiking trails and trips to the beach, and the forecast just handed you three dry days in the eighties. Somebody reading this should spend Saturday morning on the beach with a hound.

Her adoption fee is $50.

And one more, because he's a story. Alejandro is a six-year-old Anatolian Shepherd mix who weighs 102 pounds. He came in as a stray from Saucier in August, where he was, per the shelter, "found lounging on the side of the road." Their note on his face: "His eyes look sad, that's just his face." He's heartworm positive, and HSSM discounts treatment for whoever takes him. A hundred pounds of gentle, looking for a porch.

Humane Society of South Mississippi · 2615 25th Ave, Gulfport · (228) 863-3354Tue–Fri 10 AM–5 PM · Sat 10 AM–4 PM · adoptions stop about 30 minutes before close. No appointment, no holds — first come, first served. Bring a photo ID, a leash and a collar. Fees vary by dog; each dog's page shows its own.

Forward this to somebody who'd use it. New readers can subscribe at theseawallms.com. Venue owners, shelter folks, and anybody with something happening: [email protected], by Tuesday noon.

And if you know somebody thinking about moving here — a kid coming home, a coworker transferring in to Keesler or the shipyard — forward them the Ocean Springs video instead. Seven minutes on what the town is actually like, tradeoffs included.

The last concert of the summer at the fort. A corn maze opening in Kiln. A county fair on its final night, a nineteen-year-old with a harmonica, a hundred-and-fifty-six-year-old house on an oak street, and a hound who'd like to go to the beach. Three dry days and a seventy-degree Friday night to do it in.

Pick something. Take someone with you.

— The Seawall