Dauphin Island Diaries

Send us Fan Mail For decades, people stood on the mainland and imagined a way across the Mississippi Sound to Dauphin Island. Today, the drive to Dauphin Island takes us over a bridge that residents, workers, and visitors depend upon. But that familiar crossing followed generations of proposals, railroad ambitions, financing problems, and determined efforts to connect the island with the mainland....

Send us Fan Mail Season One of Dauphin Island Diaries may be complete, but before Season Two begins, we are taking a look behind the podcast and examining some of the challenges involved in researching and sharing the history of Dauphin Island, Mobile Bay, and the surrounding Gulf Coast. Dauphin Island Diaries is a one-man production. Research, writing, travel, recording, editing, marketing, guest...

Send us Fan Mail Dauphin Island is a shapeshifter. Barrier islands may appear permanent on a map, but they are constantly being rebuilt by waves, currents, wind, storms, and the movement of sand. Along the Mississippi–Alabama coast, the eastern ends of islands tend to retreat while their western ends grow—allowing the islands themselves to migrate westward over time. That movement helps explain wh...

Send us Fan Mail In 1860—more than half a century after the importation of enslaved people into the United States became illegal—the schooner Clotilda sailed past Dauphin Island and entered Mobile Bay carrying approximately 108 or 109 surviving African captives. Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher had financed the illegal expedition, and Captain William Foster had sailed the Clotilda to Ouidah on t...

Send us Fan Mail It’s INTERVIEWSDAY! This week on INTERVIEWSDAY (Interview Tuesday), we visit with John Sledge , maritime historian-in-residence at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf, for an extended conversation about wartime Mobile, the shipbuilding efforts here during World War II, and the hundreds of vessels once remembered as the Ghost Fleet. During the Second World War, Mobile underwen...

Send us Fan Mail “Amateurs study tactics, but professionals study logistics.” During World War II, the United States did more than field an enormous military. American factories produced weapons, vehicles, fuel, ammunition, food, and other matériel on a scale the Axis powers could not match. Just as important, the United States possessed the ships needed to carry those supplies around the world—an...

Send us Fan Mail It’s INTERVIEWSDAY! This week on INTERVIEWSDAY (Interview Tuesday), we visit with Bella Myers , a Mobile-area historian and tour guide with Bienville Bites Food Tour, for an extended conversation about the remarkable women remembered as the Pelican Girls. In 1704, twenty-three young Frenchwomen crossed the Atlantic aboard Le Pélican after being promised new lives in France’s strug...

Send us Fan Mail In 1704, twenty-three young Frenchwomen crossed the Atlantic aboard the Pelican in search of husbands—and a future—in the struggling colony of French Louisiana. They had been promised opportunity in a land described to them as almost a paradise. Instead, they found an overcrowded ship, months at sea, yellow fever, hunger, primitive living conditions and a settlement wholly unprepa...

Send us Fan Mail It’s INTERVIEWSDAY! This week on INTERVIEWSDAY (Interview Tuesday) , we visit with Mendel Graeber , director of the Alabama Aquarium at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. This is not a traditional sit-down interview. Mendel takes us on a walking tour through part of the aquarium while explaining its history, its organization around Alabama’s major coastal ecosystems, and its place within...

Send us Fan Mail Dauphin Island may appear permanent, but the island—and the waters surrounding it—has always been changing. Alabama’s marine-science program began in a small building raised above the marshes of Heron Bay. It later moved aboard a converted United States Army Corps of Engineers quarters boat at Point aux Pins near Bayou La Batre. After that laboratory was destroyed by fire in 1971,...

Send us Fan Mail It's INTERVIEWSDAY! This week on INTERVIEWSDAY (Interview Tuesday) , we visit with Connie Roan , a longtime educator who spent the final years of her remarkable 44-year teaching career at Dauphin Island's historic Little Red Schoolhouse . Although the building now serves as the island's Welcome Center and museum, Connie shares firsthand memories of teaching during t...

Send us Fan Mail For nearly a century, one small wooden schoolhouse has stood as a witness to the changing story of Dauphin Island. Long before there was a bridge connecting the island to the mainland, children from fishing and oystering families gathered here to learn their lessons in a community that was still little more than a remote village along the Mississippi Sound at the mouth of Mobile B...

Send us Fan Mail It's INTERVIEWSDAY! In this Interviewsday edition (Interview Tuesday) of Dauphin Island Diaries , I sit down with historian Mike Bunn to take a deeper look at the fascinating story behind last week's episode, "Ghost Town at the Top of the Bay." Mike serves as Director of Historic Blakeley State Park and is one of the foremost authorities on the history of the M...

200 years ago, there was another city at the head of Mobile Bay. For a brief but remarkable time, Blakeley rivaled Mobile in size, commerce, and ambition. Founded by a Connecticut entrepreneur who believed there was room for another great port on the Gulf Coast, Blakeley seemed destined to become one of the most important cities in the young state of Alabama. But history had other plans. In this e...

It's INTERVIEWSDAY! In this Interviewsday edition (Interview Tuesday) of Dauphin Island Diaries, I sit down with Jason Herrmann of the Alabama Marine Resources Division to explore one of the Gulf Coast's most valuable natural resources... oysters. Jason serves as Alabama's Shellfish Aquaculture Program Coordinator and has spent years working to conserve, restore, and expand oyster r...

The Sand Island Lighthouse stands three miles south of Dauphin Island at the mouth of Mobile Bay. Today it sits alone on a small ring of granite rip rap, battered by storms, erosion, and time. But it wasn't always that way. In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries, we trace the remarkable history of Alabama's most iconic lighthouse, from its beginnings as an iron spindle placed on a shi...

In this Interviewsday edition of Dauphin Island Diaries, I sit down with longtime Dauphin Island resident Anita Phillips to talk about life on the island, how it has changed over the years, and some of the people and places that have helped shape its unique character. Anita is a familiar face to many visitors. She has spent years serving as a docent at the Dauphin Island Welcome Center, helping re...

For 74 days in 1810, there was a country on the Gulf Coast that most Americans have never heard of. It had a flag, a government, a governor, and a claim to territory stretching from modern-day Louisiana toward Mobile Bay and the Perdido River. Then, almost as quickly as it appeared, it vanished. In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries , we explore the story of the Republic of West Florida, a sho...

🎙️ FREE INTERVIEW RELEASE 🎙️ This week, we're opening up a conversation that has never been released before. Back in March, I sat down with Shari Pope Moon in Cadillac Square on Dauphin Island. We weren't in a studio. We weren't in front of a microphone booth. We were sitting at a picnic table under the trees, listening to the sounds of the island around us and talking about family,...

Long before tourists crossed the bridge to Dauphin Island…before beach houses lined the west end…and before seafood restaurants turned oysters into a delicacy for visitors…there were people whose entire lives revolved around the waters of Mobile Bay. Shrimpers. Fishermen. Oystermen. For generations, oysters were part of the rhythm of life along the Alabama Gulf Coast. Families harvested them from...

Artificial reefs are one of the Alabama Gulf Coast’s strangest success stories. What began decades ago with fishermen dropping old cars and scrap into the Gulf evolved into one of the largest artificial reef systems in the world. Today, thousands of reefs dot the waters off Alabama’s coast—from retired ships and military tanks to specially designed reef pyramids built to create new marine habitat....

The shell mounds of Dauphin Island are among the oldest man-made features on the island—but they are not what they first appear to be. Built over generations by indigenous peoples connected to the Bottle Creek site in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, these mounds are the accumulated remains of seasonal life along the Gulf Coast—layers of oyster shells, tools, and fire debris that reveal how people lived,...

On the eastern end of Dauphin Island stands Fort Gaines—a quiet coastal fort with a long and complicated past. Built to guard the entrance to Mobile Bay, Fort Gaines has stood through shifting flags, changing purposes, and one of the most decisive naval engagements of the Civil War. But its story is not as simple as a single battle or a single moment in time. In this episode, we explore the origin...

Welcome to Dauphin Island Diaries , a podcast dedicated to the stories, history, and hidden corners of Alabama’s Gulf Coast. This introductory episode sets the stage for what’s to come—stories rooted in real places, shaped by the people who lived them, and connected to a landscape that still holds their memory. From coastal forts and lighthouses to hurricanes, shipwrecks, and the quiet details tha...