Oyster Pass
French Canadian explorers came along this shore in 1699, soon after the first colony at Old Biloxi. They called the channel off the beach Passe aux Huitres, Oyster Pass, for the shellfish crowding its bottom. The city says its name comes from that same deep water pass and from Nicholas Christian L'Adnier, the man credited with finding it. Pass Christian became a town in 1848, on downtown land that Charles Asmar, a free man of color, left to his heirs.
The oysters never moved. Nine reefs just out front in the Mississippi Sound cover about 20 square miles that oystermen still work, and Mississippi Today has called Pass Christian home to the state's largest oyster reef complex. A former mayor remembered seasons when more than 100,000 sacks passed through town. The harbor is still where locals buy seafood off the boats.
The last two decades were hard on the reefs. Hurricane Katrina buried them in silt in 2005, the 2010 oil spill followed, and the 2019 Bonnet Carré Spillway openings poured so much fresh water into the western Sound that MDMR put oyster deaths on its major reefs near 97 percent. The public reefs sat closed for years after that.
The comeback, reef by reef
The 2025 to 2026 season landed roughly 50,000 sacks, which MDMR called the biggest harvest in more than a decade. Its September 2026 survey, presented at a meeting in Pass Christian, counted just under 400,000 sacks across the Sound, up from about 275,000. Not every reef shared in it. A wet summer lowered salinity on Pass Christian Tonging, Pass Christian Dredging and Pass Marianne, and the agency spread limestone and shell over 236 acres of reef to help them recover.
The 2026 to 2027 season opened October 1 with the St. Joe, Henderson Point, Waveland and St. Stanislaus reefs on the list. Boats work from sunrise until a noon check out, never on Sunday. Licensed residents may take three sacks for their own table in any seven day stretch.
The town has a sailing streak too. The national heritage area credits Pass Christian with the first yacht club in the South and the second in the country, and the Pass Christian Yacht Club has run its Knost Regatta for women skippers since 1938.
