Hattiesburg’s most fashionable early residential neighborhood was developed beginning in the 1880s across the railroad from downtown and south of Gordon’s Creek. Bay Street Presbyterian Church (1907, R. H. Hunt; 202 Short Bay), with its three-tiered corner tower, is the most prominent architectural landmark. The church is similar in its auditorium plan, tower, and Romanesque Revival styling to Greenwood’s 1898 First Methodist Church (DR50), but with a stucco finish and simplified decorative scheme. Facing the church at 305 Bay Street, the Tudor Revival Hulett-Winstead Funeral Home (1930; J. Frazer Smith; pictured above) has castellated towers, half-timbering, and a steeply pitched tile roof.
Hattiesburg’s finest turn-of-the-twentieth-century residences line Short Bay Street from the Queen Annes at 102 (c. 1890) and 122 Short Bay (c. 1895) to the white-columned Classical Revival house at number 106 (c. 1905). This street also boasts a row of historic iron fences, several manufactured by Stewart Iron Works of Cincinnati. The most original house in the neighborhood is the William E. and Mary Griffin House, commanding a large corner lot at 202 Williams. Built between 1910 and 1915, it is one of the earliest Craftsman buildings in the state, with a broad, red tile gable roof, deep eaves, brackets, and exposed rafters, and a surrounding porch with bulbous cast-concrete columns beneath Asian-inspired capitals. Balconies are cut into the upper wall, without ornamental treatment. William E. Griffin was a third-generation lumberman and successor to his father’s firm, the W. C. Griffin Land Company, which owned land and mills in South Mississippi and was connected to the Dantzler companies in Moss Point.