A Place Apart, with crab on the table
Bay St. Louis sits in Hancock County on the bay that shares its name, with Waveland just to the west and Pass Christian across the water to the east. The town goes by A Place Apart. Its Old Town district, full of shotgun houses, Queen Anne cottages and bungalows listed on the National Register, still carries the look of the summer homes New Orleans families built here, and many still do.
The municipal harbor is one of the few on the coast where you can tie up a boat and walk straight into downtown. On the second Saturday of every month, Old Town shops and restaurants stay open late with live music. Back of town, the old L and N train depot holds a welcome center, the Alice Moseley Folk Art Museum and a Mardi Gras museum, with restaurants lined up around the park beside it.
The cooking leans on the bay. Blue crabs work the shallow water around town, and Mississippi sets no daily limit on hard crabs for recreational crabbers, only a minimum of 5 inches measured from spine tip to spine tip across the back. Soft crabs have no size limit at all. That is why a crab boil here is a Tuesday kind of thing, not a holiday.
How a church fair became Crab Fest
By 1985 the Our Lady of the Gulf church fair had grown past what the parish could manage. Brothers Bill and Joe Monti reshaped it as Crab Fest and set it on the Fourth of July. It spent a few years on borrowed ground before returning to the church property, where a homemade pavilion of poles and tarps kept the first crowds out of a summer downpour.
That first Crab Fest is estimated to have drawn nearly 20,000 people and gone through 3,000 pounds of shrimp and 6,000 pounds of crab. For 2026 the volunteers planned on 5,000 pounds of shrimp, 12,000 pounds of crab and 60,000 to 70,000 visitors over three days. Parish families still staff every booth, turning out barbecue shrimp, stuffed crab potatoes, fried seafood and a mayoral gumbo with a local following.
