St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church

Dudley Brooks, a freedman from Louisiana, founded this congregation in 1819, according to church historian Ann Chapman, who found the deed: Brooks paid $250 for the property and then transferred it to the church. It began as the First Free Mission Baptist Church. Members and local reports call it the oldest continuously worshipping Black congregation in Mississippi. It now meets on Market Street in Pascagoula. When the state marker was unveiled in 2019, the congregation buried a time capsule of church programs to be opened in twenty years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Round Island Lighthouse at Lighthouse Park — 1.6 mi
  What survives of the 1832 Round Island light, moved to the foot of the Pascagoula River bridge, with a free walking pathway through nine eras of Pascagoula history.
• LaPointe-Krebs House (Old Spanish Fort) — 2.1 mi
  The oldest standing structure in Mississippi, a French colonial plantation house in Pascagoula, set on land where Pascagoula and Biloxi peoples lived before the colonists came.
• Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge — 9.4 mi
  A refuge for one of the rarest birds in North America and the wet pine savanna it needs, created in 1975 as the first refuge established under the Endangered Species Act.
• Walter Anderson Museum of Art — 17 mi
  A museum in downtown Ocean Springs built around the artist who rowed to Horn Island to paint, with his 1952 murals of Iberville's 1699 landing and the Seven Climates of the town.

More markers nearby

• R.A. Farnsworth Summer House — 0.7 mi
• Camp Jefferson Davis — 0.9 mi
• Pascagoula Street Railroad and Power Company — 1.5 mi
• MS Gulf Coast Blues & Heritage Festival — 2.3 mi