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* Old Gainesville '
HATTIESBURG AMERICAN * Saturday, Jun« 16, 1962
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A town stays busy preparing
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to die in just a few weeks
GAINESVILLE - Over to the east the big jets roar in rising crescendo as the Air Force 'simulates bombing at the range deep in Devil’s Swamp. This might almost be a symbol of the shape of things to come for old Gainesville, the village on the Pearl that time couldn’t kill (— but space did.
These are the final days for this town which has known a colorful history and some prominence, and now will be a ghost town, disappearing forever from the face of the earth, although its silhoutte might be reflected on the moon to which it will succumb.
Son the roar of heavy equipment and the voices of builders will herald the readying of NASA’s ' sprawling facilities for testing the engines of the Saturn rocket. This will be the incubation of the undertaking to put an earth-man on the moon in this decade.
D-Day in Gainesville, the day on which residents are scheduled to leave and turn the area over to Space Age constructors, is now less than seven weeks away. <
Busiest summer Paradoxically, this is one of I the busiest summers in Gaines- j ville’s event-splattered existence.
There was a time when Gains-ville knew progress and enjoyed a place in the sun for once there was a courthouse, a bank, a number of good stores, a newspaper, schools, churches, a steamship ^ line and harbor. During those days, the town bustled with people.
This was a metropolis of South Mississippi — younger than Biloxi, but older than Gulfport. Steamboats coursed up and down the Pearl and people from a 100 miles around gathered here for business, sawmills dotted the vicinity and work was plentiful.
Today, Gainesville is characterized by a store soon to disappear, a couple of churches, a school already closed, about a 100 homes, and a swimming hole in the Pearl where children, released from school, splash happily, their chatter heard for a quarter of j a mile.	|
Strangers come and go endlessly, forming the chief activity in the village. They are appraisers, surveyors, negotiators, tourists and other. Some run transit lines, others tie vari-colored cloth-on the trees and bushes.
Negotiators from the Crops of Engineers stride in briskly to talk to landowners about their property, and the people dash back and forth to compare notes, prices and rumors.
Inside the homes, the people are beginning quietly to pack some of their necessities and possessions. Other are out searching for someplace to live since many have not settled on their future homes.
A survey indicated that less
than half the people here have solid ideas about what they will do, although Picayune seems sure to get most of those who .do not leave the state.
Some will take their homes outside the fee and buffer zones when ♦ they move; other live in homes so old and timeworn that the buildings would not stand hauling.
Over in the cemetery, preparations are going forward without fanfare for moving the several hundred graves, including those
of W. J. Poitevant, a prominent early day pioneer.
It seems improbable that all that must be done here will be finished by Aug. 1, but that is the date the government has decided 1 will mark the advent of the Lunar' Age. While there may be a short extension or staggered individu-'j al cases, it is clear Gainesville’s days are numbered.
Not liking it but accepting th6 [tide of the times, GainesvilleJS I a dying town.	v-