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tciK'i' Hem the end of 19C1— i the National Aeronautics wild Space Administration selected a flat, pine covered, sparsely populated 13,600 acre site along the Pearl River in Hancock County, the westernmost of the three counties that comprise the Mississippi Gulf Coast, as the testing site for the Saturn and Nova moon rockets to be produced at the Michoud plant in New Orleans only 35 miles away by water.
Access to deep water was one of the main reasons why this Mississippi site was chosen over 30 other potential locations. The rockets will be barged from the Michoud plant via the Intracoastal Waterway and the Pearl River to the testing site. After they have been found functional they will again be barged to Cape Canaveral in Florida for actual firing. The Saturn, incidentally, is the world’s largest known rocket and this new Mississippi location will be the nation’s largest rocket test site.
This static test site project, estimated to cost around $400 million, will be in operation in about three years and will employ from 500 to 1,000 scientists and engineers under the direction of the
Five Coast Less Than
In l!ii> tiulli i zone tn> }*: i■)n-1 I> uwi ers may either sell their land to t government or retain it for grazing.'' farming, mineral exploration, a bit of sub-rosa moonshining or timber cutting. However, all the present existing build-
Henry Otis points to the still existent weather vane (designed to represent a full rigged ship) that was used by the sailing schooners that served the mills in the early lumbering days of Logtown.
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lowly sheds to miiTMml homes, mils-’ be sold to the government for demolition, and no new buildings will be permitted to be erected. Nothing structurul will be left standing in either the test site or buffer zone because of the damage which repeated rocket testing on the nearby pads can do to foundations.
Westonia and Santa Rosa are today merely groups of houses that have retained their lumber boom identification. Napoleon’s only surviving point of historic interest is the site of its once busy brick plant, identified by a few crumbling brick on the riverbank, that furnished the brick for the still existent Fort Pike, a tourist attraction on the way from the Coast to New Orleans on U. S. 90.
Logtown seems to have the most to lose. It was once the headquarters of the H. Weston Lumber Company which from about 1875 until it ceased operation in 1930 employed around 500 men and during its long and successful operation produced over two. billion board feet of hardwood and pine, in addition to many thousand cords of pulpwood.
Logtown still contains close to 200
Communities With Three Years To Live
By Ray M. Thompson
Photos by T#x Hamill and Jo« Schmitt, Miss. A&I Bd.
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famed Dr., Werner Von Braun., In the
meantime the present occupants of the area have been given 30 months from the time of the announcement to move out.
Actually only about 85 families reside within the 13,500 acre test site itself, including the tiny town of Gainesville, one of the oldest communities along the Coast. It was established by Ambrose Gaines on an early land grant at the head of navigation on the Pearl River. When the Southern Railway was being constructed it was a busy town, the rails coming by water to Gainesville and from there cross country by o'xjEeam to^Pica-yune. At one time, just before the Civil War, Gainesville struggled with Bay St. Louis for the permanent possession of the county seat of Hancock, but today all that remains of that historic bid for the county government is the empty square where the Court House once stood, flanked by a few houses, a few churches and a general store. Gainesville will be completely destroyed, as all the land in the test site area will be purchased by the government and all the existing buildings will be razed.
Surrounding the actual test site is a large 128,000 acre buffer zone, most of its timberland owned by the International Paper Company, the Crosby Forest Products Company and the Weston Lumber Company. It does, however, contain about 5i7§„. families, most of them in the communities of ganta_Rosa, Logtpwa,. Weston and Napoleon—survivors of th£ Mississippi lurifti'er boom that lasted about a half. century and ended in the early Thirties.
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It too must go—this House of God in the buffer zone urith its warm, invitation to worship over the door—“WELCOME NAPOLEON BAPTIST CHURCH
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This little grocery store is the heart of what is left of Gainesville. Just across the street is the empty space where once stood the Hancock County Court House. Hack around 1859 Gainesville and Bay St. Louis both claimed the county seat, but the people preferred the livelier Coast town for county court sessions.
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people, according to Mrs. Lollie Wright who has been Post Mistress for the last 35 years, and has so many interesting historic associations, including several antebellum homes that have housed five generations of the same family, that Down South Magazine decided to pic-torially document it as it is today—before Space Age expediency has erased it, every brick and plank, from the record.
THE LOG OF LOGTOWN
Logtown, about twelve miles from the mouth of Pearl River—where the §puga Houma Bayou once formed the dividing ImeTaetween the white section and the Negro section known as Possum Walk— was originally called Chalo’Si?''*51*”
Obviously the commtfnity and the Chalons Bayou just north of town were both so named after the family who first settled here on the Joseph Chalon claim, a 1200 acre French land grant that was confirmed by the U. S. government after this territory was secured from Spain. It was first referred to as “Cabanage La-tanier” or Palmetto Plantation.
But when landing became a fine and favorite spot for handling logs on the Pearl River the Indians in the area began calling it Logtown—a more appropriate appellation because its lifelong destiny has been connected with logging and lumber. There was once a huge Indian shell mound at the Logtown landing. Remnants of it are still there today and the curious can still poke around and uncover bits of Indian pottery and bones
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