Ocean Springs — The City of Discovery, Real Storm History Included

What Actually Makes Ocean Springs Different

Ocean Springs is not a resort development or a stretch of condo towers -- it is a genuinely old Mississippi Gulf Coast town with a documented founding date centuries older than most coastal real estate markets on this site. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville selected the site on April 8, 1699 to build Fort Maurepas, the first European settlement in the lower Mississippi River valley and the first capital of French colonial Louisiana, before the tiny colony relocated to the Mobile Bay area in 1702. The settlement was later known as Lynchburg, then took its present name in 1854 when George W. Austin built a sanatorium here to capitalize on the site's mineral springs, and the city was formally incorporated on September 9, 1892. The town's own nickname, "City of Discovery," refers directly to that 1699 landing, and it isn't advertising copy -- there is a state historical marker on the subject, and the city's own "About Us" materials repeat the claim.

What sets Ocean Springs apart from most other Mississippi Gulf Coast towns, though, isn't its colonial history -- it's that it became the home and working territory of Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965), one of the more genuinely significant and famously private American watercolorists of the twentieth century. Around 1947, Anderson largely separated from his household to live alone in a cottage near the shore, making repeated solo rowboat crossings to Horn Island, a barrier island roughly twelve miles out in the Gulf and now part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, to paint its birds, storms, and shifting light for days at a time. He was periodically hospitalized for schizophrenia during these years and grew increasingly reclusive. When he died of lung cancer in 1965, his family entered his cottage and found what became known as "the Little Room" -- floor-to-ceiling murals depicting a full Gulf Coast day, from dawn to night, that he had painted for himself over roughly two decades and shown to almost no one -- along with an estate that eventually totaled more than 30,000 pen-and-ink drawings, watercolors, and carvings. His brother Peter Anderson (1901-1984) founded Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs in 1928, achieving national recognition at New York's Contemporary American Ceramics Exhibition by 1931, and Peter's own murals for the Ocean Springs Community Center in 1952 are still preserved and on display today, physically connected to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, which opened at 510 Washington Avenue in 1991 after growing out of the Friends of Walter Anderson, incorporated in 1974.

That family's legacy shapes the town's whole character, not just one museum. The Peter Anderson Arts & Crafts Festival, held the first weekend of every November in downtown Ocean Springs, draws more than 150,000 visitors and over 400 artist booths, making it Mississippi's largest fine arts festival, per the festival's own materials and regional press coverage. Downtown itself -- centered on Washington Avenue and Ocean Avenue, shaded by live oaks reported at more than 300 years old -- won the National Main Street Center's Great American Main Street Award in 2013, a real juried national recognition rather than a self-applied label, and the whole district is genuinely walkable: galleries, boutiques, cafes, and two public downtown beaches (Front Beach and East Beach) within a compact, oak-canopied footprint. That's a real, structural difference from Biloxi, immediately across Biloxi Bay via the US 90 bridge, whose economy runs on casino resorts and 24-hour gaming -- Ocean Springs has what multiple travel writers describe as a minimal casino presence and an intentionally different, arts-and-cottages identity.

Storm history here is real and it should inform how seriously a buyer treats insurance and elevation. Hurricane Katrina made landfall August 29, 2005 with a storm surge FEMA's own Mississippi inundation mapping puts at roughly 28 feet in parts of the coast; Ocean Springs-specific reporting describes considerable damage to homes below 20 feet MSL elevation and 4,728 properties affected citywide, and the Biloxi-Ocean Springs Bridge was destroyed outright when the surge toppled its concrete decking (it has since been rebuilt). Hurricane Camille in August 1969 remains the historical high-water mark for the wider Mississippi coast -- a Category 5 storm that made landfall at Waveland with an estimated 175 mph sustained winds, the strongest ever recorded at landfall for a US hurricane, killing at least 343 people across the country. FEMA, MEMA, and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality redrew the coast's flood elevation maps in May 2009 in direct response to what Katrina revealed about actual surge behavior -- a real, dated regulatory response, not background noise.

Several practical facts a buyer or mover needs were not independently confirmed at a level this page is willing to state as settled, and it does not guess at them. Not confirmed: the exact current combined property-tax millage rate for a specific Ocean Springs address (city, county, and school-district mills vary by fire district and school zone, and the city's own school-millage calculation was publicly reported as erroneous for the 2025 fiscal year); a specific current wind, flood, or combined insurance premium for an Ocean Springs property as opposed to general Mississippi coastal ranges; and a clean, current waterfront-versus-inland price premium. Anyone seriously evaluating a purchase here should confirm current numbers directly with the Jackson County Tax Assessor, the City of Ocean Springs, a Mississippi-licensed insurance agent, and a local buyer's agent rather than assuming an online estimate is current.