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“Stennis told the people that the government would keep up the Logtown road so we could come in and visit our dead,” says Fountain. “And they’ve kept that promise. The town’s gone, but the cemetery is still there and people are still being brought back there to be buried. That’s where all of us want to go — in the end.”
Stennis told the crowd that the deadline for leaving home, hearth and memories behind was November, 1964.
“He told us that we’d be paid dollar for dollar, an equal amount, to replace the home that had to be torn down,” rememoers Fountain. “Now, that’s hard to do. How can you be fair in a situation like that? It was very difficult, but we didn’t argue. Some of the people moved to Picayune, which is on the other side of the test site/and some went to Waveland and Bay St. Louis. Because it was the nearest place to go, most moved to Pearlington, five miles down the road.”
The Summerses moved their home and grocery store rom Logtown to Pearlington.	^
“Our home was attached to the store,” says Eldora Jummers. “We moved them both at the same time. They iad to cut it in half to get it moved. It took a week to move t. Some of the time, my husband rode on the house as it vas being moved. He threw bubblegum to the children as, ; ie went by. We had to go the back way, which meant they! iad to cut down a lot of those big old oaks. ^
“A lot of our customers moved into the same area where _ re put our store. We didn’t lose any business the-month ’ ve moved. We kept right on going.	..
“We kept the store until my husband was killed there in m armed robbery on Aug. 31, 1973. 1 still own the place
mt I rent it out. ■	:	-	%.	'
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“We’ve had some great years here in Pearlington, but hey don’t compare to the ones we had in Logtown.”
LIKE THE SUMMERSES, some left Logtown quickly nd peacefully; others grudgingly held on to the last linute. Time has mellowed bad feelings somewhat, but not , ntirely. Fountain holds no grudge but she has relatives /ho do.
“My sister-in-law, Mildred Otis, is still bitter‘about the -vhole mess,” she says. “She grew up down the street
Above, former Logtown factory site on the Pearl River. Left, former residents still return to visit the Logtown cemetery.
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union with her parents and three half-sisters after she was grown and working in New, Orleans. ’ y “We all decided to take a house at Waveland Beach" for a ;’J month,’’ says Fountain. “We didn’t think my father would be interested in coming along. He was about 84 at this time$I* ind he surprised u3 very much by telling us that he would ^ £o to Waveland Beach with us. We were pleased because that meant mother could also go.	*	?	. >
| “So, when we all got ready to leave, we discovered that~T we didn’t have any keys to the house. We didn’t have any, way of locking up our house. I realized for the first time that we had never, in.all the time that I was growing, locked our house. And I didn’t leave home until I was 22.'“'
• “Now, that really did astound me, particularly when you j> think about that in this period of time. But I didn’t think ^ about it when I was growing up. We slept with our" doors and windows open. We had hooks on the front and back'
■ • • $ Staff photos by Eliot Kamenitz ^
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was picked up by a boat and brought to a landing, wherl the,post office was. That's all that was there. And I still'' remember that. I was still in grammar school.	j
“Opening up Highway 90 made this part of the country more accessible, and that’s when people from New Orleans began buying weekend places over here. If you wanted to go into Nev? Orleans back when I was a child, you got on 4 tugboat and rode to English Lookout, which is where th^ train stopped. You got on the train and rode into New Orleans and stayed the whole dayrThat’s what we did when I was a little girl.	J
-..J-In the old days, we didn’t have a resident physician it} Logtown. You had to drive'at least 20 miles to go to a doctor t>r a dentist, or even a picture show. And that would be either to Picayune, or Bay St. Louis or Slidell.	'
. “My father,, as the pharmacist (we had the grocery and drugstore down by the river), was sort of like the first*