Kiln, MS

Kiln is a Hancock County census-designated place about 50 miles northeast of New Orleans, with the Jourdan River along its southern side and Bayou Coco and Bayou Talla in the lower landscape. The place was once called the Jourdan River Community, and the name Kiln took hold from the tar kilns used to support the naval-stores trade. Pine timber, river transport, and schooner routes to New Orleans gave the community an early working economy.

The timber mills are gone, yet Kiln's history remains legible in the river, the old church-and-school circuit, and the Jourdan River School, a 1929 building recognized by Mississippi as a historic landmark and the only surviving rural African American school building in Hancock County. Hancock County School District serves the community, with Hancock High School in Kiln. The river remains the town's strongest geographic marker. The Kiln's present-day map runs along local roads between the Jourdan and bayous, with Bay St. Louis and the Gulfport-Biloxi region providing the larger coastal connection.