Dauphin Island Diaries

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 scheduling, and everything else involved in producing the program all pass through Big John.

Producing a place-based history podcast from several hundred miles away presents additional challenges. In this interseason release, I discuss the importance of traveling to the places featured in the podcast—from Fort Gaines and Historic Blakeley to Sand Island Lighthouse and the former Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company site—and why seeing the physical setting can reveal things that books, photographs, and maps cannot.

Other challenges arise from the differences between short-form social-media content and long-form podcast storytelling, the limited documentation available for some periods of Gulf Coast history, and the difficult decisions required when more material exists than can reasonably fit into a single episode.

Finally, we consider what happens when historical sources disagree. Using the Battle of Mobile Bay as an example, I explain how people can witness the same event honestly while describing it very differently because of where they stood, what they experienced, and what the outcome meant to them.

The episode concludes with a preview of Season Two. Beginning in November, Dauphin Island Diaries will move to a monthly release schedule for a seven-month season. Planned subjects include the bridges connecting Dauphin Island to the mainland, the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, major hurricanes that have affected the island during the past half-century, and Dauphin Island’s bird sanctuaries. Full-length INTERVIEWSDAY releases will also appear on the fifth Tuesdays occurring during the season.

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.

This Season One finale explores an island that survives by changing—and the complicated choices people face when roads, homes, historic landmarks, fisheries, and entire communities are built upon moving ground.

Dauphin Island is not the same island seen by Bienville, the builders of Fort Gaines, or even residents who experienced Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. Its familiar outline is only a temporary arrangement.

The shapeshifter never stops shifting.

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.

In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries, Big John Summers explores the forces that gave rise to the Atlantic slave trade, Timothy Meaher’s illegal wager, the voyage of the Clotilda, the experiences of the people imprisoned aboard it, the failure of federal prosecution, the establishment of Africatown, and the discovery and identification of the ship’s wreckage more than a century and a half later.

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 underwent a dramatic transformation. The city’s population nearly doubled as workers arrived from throughout the region to build and repair the vessels needed for the Allied war effort. At ADDSCO, thousands of men and women produced Liberty ships and T2 tankers on the Mobile River before launching them sideways from the concrete shipways still visible today.

When the war ended, hundreds of now-surplus vessels were placed in reserve—first along the Mobile River and later on the Tensaw River. At its height, this Ghost Fleet contained 347 ships maintained for possible future service. Over time, the vessels were reactivated, sold, scrapped, or sunk as artificial reefs, and the final ships were removed in 1973.

Recorded at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf, this conversation took place overlooking the Mobile River and the surviving ADDSCO shipways from which vessels were launched during the Second World War.

John Sledge is an award-winning historian, historic preservationist, author, and book critic. His books include The Mobile River, The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History, These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War, and Mobile and Havana: Sisters Across the Gulf.

“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—and the warships required to protect them.  Mobile played a significant role in that achievement.

When the war ended, hundreds of vessels were no longer needed for immediate service. Many entered reserve fleets, where they were preserved in case another emergency required them. Some ships built in Mobile became “ghosts” in reserve fleets elsewhere, while the overwhelming majority gathered in the Mobile-Tensaw Reserve Fleet had been built in shipyards around the country.

The Ghost Fleet was not merely a collection of abandoned ships. It was a reserve created from the greatest shipbuilding effort the world had ever seen.

They built ships. They helped build a logistical system capable of reaching nearly anywhere in the world. And when the war was over, many of the ships they built became ghosts.

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 struggling Louisiana colony. Instead, they encountered a dangerous voyage, yellow fever, primitive living conditions, food shortages, absent husbands, and a settlement that bore little resemblance to the “promised land” they had been led to expect.

Yet the Pelican Girls endured. They married, established families, demanded better living conditions, and helped transform a rough colonial outpost into a permanent community. Their resistance became known as the Petticoat Rebellion, and their descendants would spread throughout Mobile, New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and beyond.

Recorded on August 1—Pelican Girls Day in Mobile—this conversation explores the strength, resilience, and determination of twenty-three young women whose contributions to the history of Mobile and the Gulf Coast deserve to be remembered.

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 unprepared to receive them.

In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries, we tell the story of the Pelican Girls—the first organized company of Frenchwomen sent to the Mobile colony expressly to establish marriages, households and permanent families.

The Pelican Girls survived the voyage, disease, hunger and the uncertain conditions of an isolated frontier settlement. They established households, bore children and helped transform French Louisiana from a remote military outpost into a permanent colonial society.

The promised land they were assured did not exist—so they helped build one.

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 the Sea Lab’s larger research and educational mission.

Mendel’s tour demonstrates that the Alabama Aquarium is much more than a collection of exhibits. It is the public face of a major marine research and educational institution—and a place where visitors can better understand the extraordinary environments surrounding Dauphin Island, Mobile Bay and the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Dauphin Island may appear permanent, but the island—and the waters surrounding it—has always been changing.

In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries, we explore the history and mission of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and the Alabama Aquarium. We follow the Sea Lab’s development from its improvised beginnings near Bayou La Batre to its transformation of an abandoned military installation into one of Alabama’s most important centers for marine research and education.

The Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Alabama Aquarium’s educational mission not only teaches us about the environment around the island, but also helps us understand our place within it.

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 the school's final years and offers a fascinating look at how both the school and the island have changed over the decades. 

Connie's memories bring the Little Red Schoolhouse to life and remind us that historic buildings are more than lumber and brick. They are places where generations of stories were lived before they were ever recorded.

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 Bay. Over the decades, the Little Red Schoolhouse watched as the island weathered the Great Depression, World War II, hurricanes, commercial development, and the transformation of Dauphin Island into one of Alabama's best-known coastal communities.

Today, the Little Red Schoolhouse is much more than a historic building. It is a museum, a gathering place, a lending library, and one of the island's most treasured landmarks. Step inside, and you'll discover not only the story of a school, but the story of the people who have called Dauphin Island home for generations.

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 Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the Alabama Gulf Coast. His research and expertise were invaluable in developing the story of Blakeley, a town that once rivaled Mobile for prominence before fading into history.

While last week's episode told the story of Blakeley's rise and fall, this interview allows us to go much deeper into the history with one of the people who knows it best. If you enjoyed "Ghost Town at the Top of the Bay," you'll find even more context, insight, and fascinating details in this extended conversation.

In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries, we explore the rise and fall of the ghost town just above Mobile Bay: the old town of Blakeley. Along the way, we'll look at the optimism of the early American frontier, the opening of the Old Southwest, steamboats, yellow fever, land speculation, and the fierce economic rivalry between Blakeley and Mobile that ultimately shaped the future of Mobile Bay.

Today, only the old courthouse foundations, a cemetery, and memories remain. Yet if you stand beneath the live oaks overlooking the Tensaw River, it's still almost  possible to imagine the bustling town that once stood there...and to wonder what might have been had history chosen a different path.

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 resources in Alabama waters. His expertise helped provide much of the background research for our recent episode, "The World Is Your Oyster," and in this conversation he explains why oysters have been so important to the Gulf Coast's history, economy, and environment.

Like many of our Interviewsday conversations, this episode provides the deeper background behind one of our historical stories. While "The World Is Your Oyster" explored the history of Alabama's oyster industry, this interview offers insight from someone who works every day to help ensure that tradition continues for future generations

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 shifting sand island to the towering brick sentinel that has watched over Mobile Bay for more than 150 years.

More than a lighthouse story, this is the story of man's attempt to build something permanent on land that never stopped moving.

Today, the Sand Island Lighthouse remains standing, but its future is uncertain. Whether it survives another century or falls in the next great storm, it continues to stand watch at the entrance to Mobile Bay, a silent witness to generations of Gulf Coast history.

It's INTERVIEWSDAY!

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 residents and tourists alike learn more about the island's history, culture, and attractions. She is also the widow of the late architect and artist Gene Phillips, whose colorful condominium designs along LeMoyne Drive have become one of the island's most recognizable landmarks.

Like many of our Interviewsday conversations, this episode offers a personal perspective that complements the historical stories we tell on Dauphin Island Diaries. History is ultimately about people, and few people know the island and its community better than Anita Phillips.

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 short-lived nation born from the collision of Spanish colonial rule, American expansion, frontier settlement, and international intrigue during the age of Napoleon.

It's INTERVIEWSDAY!

Back in March, I sat down with Shari Pope Moon in Cadillac Square on Dauphin Island. We weren't in a studio. What followed was less of an interview and more of a conversation.

Shari shares the story of her parents' island love story, the family tradition that has brought generations back to Dauphin Island year after year, the old casino and Isle Dauphine Club, the original drawbridge, Hurricane Frederic, Fort Gaines, the Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, and what makes this island feel like home to so many people.

If you've ever wondered why people fall in love with Dauphin Island and keep coming back generation after generation, this conversation helps explain it.

For generations, oysters were part of the rhythm of life along the Alabama Gulf Coast. Families harvested them from the shallow waters of Mobile Bay, Bon Secour Bay, Mississippi Sound, and the waters around Dauphin Island. Entire communities depended on them. In places like Bayou La Batre and Bon Secour, oysters helped sustain a working waterfront culture that stretched back long before modern tourism arrived on the coast.

In this episode, we explore the long and complicated history of the oyster industry in the Mobile Bay region—from the Native American shell mounds at Dauphin Island and Bottle Creek…to the heyday of commercial oystering…to the environmental struggles threatening the reefs today.

In this episode, we explore how artificial reefs transformed the waters off Dauphin Island and the Alabama coast, changing not only fishing and diving culture, but the ecology of the Gulf itself.

We examine the rise of Alabama’s reef-building program, the science behind why reefs work, and the ongoing debates surrounding them. Along the way, we dive into stories of sunken warships, offshore platforms turned “vertical reefs,” invasive lionfish, Red Snapper management, and the strange afterlife of vessels whose final voyage became a new beginning beneath the waves.

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, adapted, and returned to this place year after year.

In this episode, we explore the origins of the shell mounds, the people who created them, and the role Dauphin Island played as a seasonal refuge—what we might call, in a modern sense, an ancient “snowbird” destination.

This is the story of a place where memory, survival, and landscape come together—layer by layer.

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 origins of the fort, its role in the Battle of Mobile Bay, and the layers of history that surround it—from early coastal defenses to later abandonment and preservation.

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 that most people miss, this series is about more than just history—it’s about understanding the place itself.