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K., SUNDAY M'ORNi... j;' JANWaRY 8, 198S
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Town Loses Fight to Survive
Space Age Uproots Miss. People
By IMYID ZIN.MAN
GAINESVILLE, Miss. (AP— xiuise Elizabeth Loveless sils n her tin-roofed country home icar 1he banks of (he Pearl ■liver and talks about the good >ld days.
To Mrs. Loveless, they are lie day before Washington decided to build a S500 million "ocket test center in Ihe sleepy lackwoods of Southern Mississippi.
The base - - a vital link in the race to the moon—is wiping out her home, her counti-y store ind the antebellum town of Gainesville, population of about 100. Everything, even Gainesville's ancient graveyard which existed before Mississippi became a state in 1817, is being uprooted.
In two years, the nearby communities of Ijogtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, Westonia, Bayou La Croix and Flat Top will also become ghost towns, erased from the map to make man’s age-, less dream of a trip to the moon come true.
“What makes It so bad is that we'll be starling all over," Mrs. Loveless. SB. said. She is one of a half dozen families left I in Gainesville. The government ' says she must get out by Thurs-I day.
Target Date Is 1965
'Hie land the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is taking consists of 141.000 acres—about 220 square miles -of flat, pine fimberland and swamp in Hancock and Pearl River counties. Miss., pnd St. Tammany Parish, La.
On a government map. the rocket area looks like a small circle inside a larger circle.
In the inner circle's 13,000 leres—some 120 miles south of Ihe capital at Jackson—NASA will build the Mississippi test facility. It should be ready by the fall of 1064. Target date for lest firing is 1965.
Here, where Gainesville thrived as an early 19th cen-lury rivertown and sawmill center. then slid downhill when the railroad bypassed it in 1883, the space agency will put up a complex of giant rocket, test towers—some taller thun the
— Photo bv AP Newsfea.turpj.
NICKillKORS ENJOY I AST CUP OF COFFER TOCiKTIIKIl
Mrs. IJoyd Jones (holding cup) Is joined by her sons, William, 21 and Kandy, B, and Mrs.
Louis Elizabeth Loveless. In background workers prepare to move tho Jones home.
easement rights to most of this land—that is, authority to use the land without actually owning it.
No hig rocket buildings will go up here. Residents can farm.
But no one may live in the buffer zone. NASA says sound wa\*s from test blasts could crumble a house.
The ticklish and often heartrending job of buying the land from people who have lived there all their lives went to Orrelle B.
Moore, a 43-year-old career government worker who has the title of project manager. He heads a real estate team that operates out of nearby Bay St. Louis,
Miss., for the US Army Engineers.
Moore started by sending appraisers into the area to evaluate each owner's property. When I his was done, negotiators—all Mississippi men, by no accident—sat down with the owners to try to get them to accept the government's price. If they reach agreement. the government pays them and they get out.
Some Not Satisfied
If no agreement is reached, the government files a condemnation proceeding and takes the
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