What’s Happening Around South Alabama: Mid-September Events From Mystery Dinners to the Coastal Cleanup

Mid-September brings a full slate of events across the Mobile area and Baldwin County, from a Civil War history lunch downtown to a songwriter showcase in Gulf Shores and a coast-wide cleanup push. Here’s what’s on the calendar. The next two weeks pack venues on both sides of Mobile Bay — museums, parks, libraries, churches and the deck of a battleship — with enough programming that even the most dedicated calendar-watcher will have to make choices.

History Takes Center Stage

The History Museum of Mobile’s Learning Lunch series welcomes local author and historian Paul Brueske on Wednesday, Sept. 11, discussing his book The Last Siege: The Mobile Campaign, Alabama 1865, an account of the Civil War operations that closed out the war in this corner of the Gulf. The Learning Lunch series is a downtown fixture, drawing a standing-room crowd of history buffs to the museum’s auditorium for free midday lectures by authors, academics and public historians. Brueske’s subject is a fitting one for the venue: the Mobile Campaign of 1865, culminating in the Battle of Spanish Fort and the Battle of Fort Blakeley, was among the last major land operations of the Civil War, and its traces remain scattered across the northern Mobile Bay landscape.

History also sails Saturday, Sept. 14, when a Port of Mobile Cruise departs Historic Blakeley Park at 9 a.m., touring the lower Delta waterways with an up-close look at one of the nation’s most modern harbors. Tickets run $35 for adults and $17 for children 6-12. The cruise pairs two stories that rarely get told together: the Tensaw Delta, one of the largest river deltas in the country and a refuge for everything from alligators to migrating waterfowl, and the working Port of Mobile, whose container terminals, bulk carriers and shipbuilding activity make it one of the busiest harbors on the Gulf. Departing from Blakeley — site of the Civil War battlefield and the ghost town that once rivaled Mobile as a river port — passengers travel the same waters that carried both warships and cotton steamers in the nineteenth century.

Music on the Waterfront

Gulf Shores’ Sunset Series at Gulf Place continues Thursday, Sept. 12, with “The Trio” — Carl Jackson, Jerry Salley and Larry Cordle — offering a preview of the upcoming Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival. Admission is free on the town green and public beach.

The Sunset Series has become one of Gulf Shores’ signature free events, staging live music against the backdrop of the public beach at the foot of State Highway 59. The Sept. 12 lineup is a heavyweight one by any standard: Jackson is a Grammy-winning veteran of Glen Campbell’s band and an acclaimed Nashville songwriter, while Salley and Cordle have written or co-written a long list of country and bluegrass standards. The trio format — three writers trading songs and the stories behind them in the round — is the same setup that draws thousands to the Frank Brown festival each November, when venues from Gulf Shores to Pensacola host more than two hundred songwriters over more than a week.

Meanwhile, the Brown Bag Concert series keeps its weekly rhythm: Wednesdays in Bienville Square, Thursdays at May Day Park in Daphne and Fridays at The Mill in Fairhope, all from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., featuring Lisa Mills Sept. 11-13 and the Excelsior Band Sept. 18-20. The series, now a mainstay on both sides of the bay, invites downtown workers and retirees to bring a lunch and claim a bench or a patch of grass through the lunch hour.

Mills is a Mobile-raised blues and soul singer whose career has taken her to Europe and back, while the Excelsior Band is a Mobile institution in the truest sense — the brass band, founded in 1883, is believed to be one of the oldest continuously operating bands in America and leads Mardi Gras parades through downtown every Carnival season. Hearing them in Bienville Square, the oak-shaded park bounded by Dauphin, St. Francis, Royal and Conti streets, is as close as the schedule comes to a Mobile history lesson set to music.

Downtown Mobile’s LoDa Artwalk returns Friday, Sept. 13, when galleries, restaurants and shops across the Lower Dauphin arts district open their doors for a family-friendly evening of exhibitions and entertainment. The monthly Artwalk, held on the second Friday of each month, has been a cornerstone of downtown Mobile’s revival, turning the blocks around Lower Dauphin Street into a pedestrian promenade of gallery openings, street performers and vendor booths. The district’s concentration of restored storefronts, restaurants and the Saenger Theatre makes it the natural anchor for the city’s creative scene.

Night Out for Good Causes

Heron Lakes Country Club hosts “Who Shot JR?” Friday, Sept. 13, at 7 p.m., a Mobile Mystery Dinners production with limited seating. The company stages interactive murder-mystery dinners across the area, casting audience members as both suspects and detectives, and the September installment tips its hat to the television cliffhanger that once gripped the country. Heron Lakes, a public-access course and event venue in northwest Mobile, has carved out a niche hosting banquets and fundraisers away from the downtown core.

Government Plaza fills Thursday, Sept. 12, from 5:30 to 9 p.m. for “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” benefiting Ronald McDonald House Charities of Mobile with heavy hors d’oeuvres, makeovers and shopping. The Ronald McDonald House, on the USA Medical Center campus, provides lodging for families whose children are undergoing extended hospital treatment, and events like this one fund the operation year-round. Government Plaza, the towering municipal complex on Government Street that houses City Hall and Mobile County offices, opens its ground-floor atrium for charity galas and civic functions throughout the year.

United Cerebral Palsy of Mobile stages Food & Folly Thursday, Sept. 19, at Fort Whiting Armory, where chefs compete for guest votes alongside wine, craft beer and a silent auction. The event is one of the local charity calendar’s most popular food nights, drawing restaurants from across the area to compete in front of a voting crowd while raising money for UCP’s programs serving children and adults with disabilities. Fort Whiting, the 1930s-era National Guard armory on Broad Street, has long served as one of Mobile’s great event halls, hosting everything from circuses to commencement exercises.

And the USS Alabama’s Medal of Honor Aircraft Pavilion hosts The Throwdown Friday, Sept. 20 — a Mobile Arts Council live art competition between five artists, paired with music and a silent auction; tickets are $30 in advance. The Pavilion, an enclosed hangar honoring Alabama’s Medal of Honor recipients and housing the park’s aircraft collection, gives the competition an unmistakable setting: artists working at speed in the shadows of vintage warplanes. Battleship Memorial Park, the state-run attraction on Mobile Bay, ranks among the city’s most-visited landmarks.

Lectures Worth the Trip

Dauphin Way United Methodist Church’s Dill Lecture Series brings journalist and podcast host Krista Tippett to Mobile Sunday, Sept. 22, at 5:30 p.m. for “The Adventure of Civility.” Tippett received the National Humanities Medal in 2014; the talk is free and open to all, followed by a reception and book signing. Tippett, the creator of the long-running public radio program On Being, has built a national audience exploring faith, ethics and meaning in public life, and the Dill Series has a record of landing speakers of similar stature for its free downtown lectures.

At the University of South Alabama, award-winning poet Danez Smith — author of the Forward Prize-winning collection Don’t Call Us Dead and a National Book Award finalist — reads Thursday, Sept. 19, at 6 p.m. in the Student Center Outdoor Amphitheater. Smith, a Minnesota-based writer known for performances that mix poetry and theater, is one of the most decorated young poets working today, and the outdoor amphitheater setting gives the reading a casual, campus-festival feel.

Cleanups, Festivals and Family Fun

Saturday, Sept. 21, marks the 32nd annual coastal cleanup along Dog River, with bags, gloves and water bottles provided plus lunch and T-shirts for volunteers. The Dog River site is one of the most popular of the dozens of landing points that make up Alabama’s coastal cleanup, the state’s participation in the International Coastal Cleanup coordinated by the Ocean Conservancy. Dog River and its tributaries drain a large swath of west Mobile, and cleanup volunteers pull everything from plastic bottles to construction debris from the watershed before it reaches Mobile Bay. The tradition, now in its third decade, has grown into the largest single-day volunteer event on the Alabama coast, mobilizing thousands of residents each fall.

Bienville Square hosts Rise of Climate Mobile Bay Friday, Sept. 20, from noon to 5 p.m., an education-focused gathering organized by the Mobile Bay Sierra Club and MEJAC. The event aims to put climate and environmental education in front of a downtown lunchtime and afternoon audience, with exhibits and programming focused on coastal resilience — a topic of immediate relevance in a low-lying port city where flooding, storm surge and shoreline erosion are recurring concerns.

Ben May Main Library offers an African American genealogy workshop focused on maps Saturday morning and a children’s fall festival with a petting zoo and pumpkin bowling Sept. 21, while Foley Public Library hosts a free session on probate records for family historians the same Saturday. The downtown Mobile library, the flagship of the Mobile Public Library system, has built a following among genealogists for its local history and maps collections, and workshops like the September session walk researchers through records that can be difficult to navigate alone. Foley’s session serves the fast-growing south Baldwin County research community, where family histories stretch back to the area’s railroad-era settlement boom.

Fairhope’s American Legion Post 199 throws a barbecue for first responders and their families Saturday, Sept. 14, complete with live music and a waterslide, and the 7th Annual Golf Classic at Rock Creek Club raises funds Tuesday, Sept. 12, for the Baldwin County Education Coalition — the coalition’s sole fundraiser of the year. The coalition works across Baldwin County’s fast-expanding public school system, the fastest-growing in Alabama, and the golf tournament at the Fairhope-area course represents its main funding event for the year’s programs.

On Display All Season

Ongoing exhibits include the History Museum of Mobile’s diamond-formation show through Dec. 1, “Married in Mobile,” showcasing wedding gowns from 1852 onward, and Eudora Welty’s photography at USA’s Marx Library through the end of September. The wedding dress exhibition traces more than a century and a half of bridal fashion through garments worn in Mobile, from antebellum era gowns through the modern day. The Welty photographs — work by the Mississippi novelist who was also a gifted documentary photographer — capture Depression-era Mississippi and the Deep South, making the Marx Library show a rare chance to see them locally.

The Mobile Museum of Art remains free to Mobile County residents every Thursday evening, a standing offer that makes the city’s fine arts museum — set on the grounds of Langan Park in west Mobile — one of the most accessible cultural institutions in the region. Its collection spans American and European painting, craft and Asian art, and the free Thursday hours have made it a regular stop for families and students who might not otherwise visit.

Between the lectures, the concerts, the charity nights and the cleanup crews, the middle of September offers an unusually complete picture of the Gulf Coast’s civic life: a region that turns out in force for its history, its songwriters, its first responders and its waterways alike. Anyone hoping to catch everything on this calendar will need a second calendar — and probably a ferry schedule.