by Ezabelle Janssen, Staff Writer
GULFPORT (GG) — On 31st Avenue in downtown Gulfport, a house once fading quietly into the background has come back to life. Its walls hold more than a century of stories, stories that nearly vanished before hairstylist and small-business owner Lauren Damond stepped inside. Damond, best known for her salon Hair and Tonic, first discovered the property in a real estate listing sent by her agent. “I remember looking at the listing and going, oh my God… it looks like a secret garden,” she said. “It reminds me of the movie Little Women.”
She brought her father to see it. They stood at the edge of the sidewalk, looking up at the charming, aged grin of the house. “He said, ‘I love it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you too.’” What she didn’t know then was that she wasn’t just buying a building, she was stepping into a story that had been waiting for someone willing to listen.
Saving what others would have torn down, in the months that followed, investors stopped by with eager eyes and demolition-sized plans. “Just to think that I have something on the Coast that not everybody has,” Damond said. “So many investors have come by and said, ‘Do you mind if I just look around?’ I’d say, ‘Sure, come on in.’ And I’d ask, ‘What were you gonna do with it?’ And they’re like, ‘Just rip it down.’ And I’m like, oh my God, I saved it.”
Her voice carries a mix of disbelief and pride, the kind that only comes from realizing you were the last stop before history fell apart.
With land records dating back to 1912 connecting the home to Julia Moore, a schoolteacher, principal, stenographer for the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, avid gardener, and longtime resident of these streets, the more Damond learned about Moore, the more she understood what she had inherited.
“It kind of went full circle,” she said. “To sit back in here and go, wow, my name even makes more sense now.” Her business name, Hair and Tonic, was inspired by early-1900s grooming practices. Now, the business itself is nestled inside a home built in that very era! However, renovating a 100-plus-year-old structure is not romantic. It’s noisy, expensive, and unforgiving. “Every time you try to replace one thing,” Damond laughed, “you’re like, ‘I gotta work out the things behind it now.’”
She worked alongside her father, but they struggled for months to find contractors willing to touch an old-structure restoration. Many overbid. Others walked away. Some simply didn’t “see the vision.”
Still, their North Star stayed the same: bring the house back to its original glory. Eventually, a contractor came in with the same passion for historic revival as Damond. But the turning point arrived when historian Ed Hilton stepped in.
Hilton, who works and researches Gulfport properties for the local museum, dove into directories, land deeds, city records, fire insurance maps, genealogy databases, and newspaper clippings. Slowly, he pieced together a timeline of the home’s earliest occupants. “I can walk down this street and say, ‘This is where Juliet walked… where she went grocery shopping… where she worked,’” he said. “I’m trying to recreate people’s lives like this.”
For Damond, that research transformed everything. “I think bringing the history… posting pictures… it makes my clients and my stylists even more connected to this house,” she said. “It’s like bringing it back to life.”
She plans to plant the same flowers Julia Moore once grew, to frame old photos in the entryway, to breathe Moore’s world back into modern Gulfport.
Rhorer House, the name Damond chose for the revived space, quietly opened four weeks ago. Construction delays pushed the debut back, but for a historic restoration, the timeline remained swift. The community’s response has been immediate, “Everybody that walks in says, ‘Oh my God… it feels cozy. It feels comfortable,’” she said. “I feel like she’s [the home] happy,” Damond added softly. “And we feel like… everybody feels it.”
Along the coast, where many historic structures have been demolished, repurposed beyond recognition, or lost entirely to storms and development, Rhorer House stands out as a rare victory.
“I’ve been a hairstylist for 16 years,” Damond said. “My first location was the Old Train Depot… and I got the name Hair and Tonic because in the early 1900s, they used tonics to take care of men’s beards and scalps.” Fate, it seems, has a sense of humor and a sense of direction. Her journey has looped right back into the same era that inspired her salon!
On 31st Avenue, where Gulfport’s memory still hums beneath the sidewalks, a once-tired house is alive again. Not because it had to be, but because someone wanted it to be. Sometimes it only takes one person to keep a story from disappearing.
This one, on 31st Avenue, is still writing its next chapter.
(Photos by Ezabelle Janssen/The Gazebo Gazette)
