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he Summerses moved their home and grocery store a Logtown to Pearlington.	_	^
Dur home was attached to the store,” says Eldora imers. “We moved them both at the same time- They • to cut it in half to get it moved. It took a week to move ome of the time, my husband rode on the house as it " being moved. He threw .bubblegum to the children as 'V /ent by. We had to go the back way, which meant they to cut down a lot of those big old oaks.
^ lot of our customers moved into the same area where put our store. We didn’t lose any business the month noved. We kept right on going.
Ve kept the store until my husband was killed there in irmed robbery on Aug. 31, 1973. I still own the place I rent it out.
Ve’ve had some great years here in Pearlington, but don’t compare to the ones we had in Logtown.” w
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KE THE SUMMERSES, some left Logtown quickly peacefully; others grudgingly held on to the last ite. Time has mellowed bad feelings somewhat, but not ely. Fountain holds no grudge but she has relatives do.
ly sister-in-law, Mildred Otis, is still bitter about the le mess,” she says. “She grew up down the street i us. The Otises had a palatial home. It sat back from road, and it was what they referred to in Louisiana plantation cottage, I suppose. It had about 15 to 20. is, with porches all around. It was a huge, two-story
®* i ' rou see, when we had to move out of the Logtown area, wouldn’t think that this would be such a traumatic but it was very difficult to find a house that was parable to what we had to give up. You could buy a.*... e with 8-foot ceilings, but you couldn’t put a tester that was 9-feet tall in a house with 8-foot ceilings. That tme a very difficult problem. We all had to look louses with more spacious rooms and higher ceilings use everybody had antique furniture.”	,
lot of people have given up as much or more for their itry. What made Logtown so special?
’o the people who lived there, it was a paradise,” says mers. “I remember that it was just a close-knit * munity. I like to quote Mr. Otis, who used to say. that, ybody tended to their own business but when trouble e, everybody helped. They were that close.”
> illustrate the uniqueness of her birthplace, Fountain 5 to tell about the time she returned to Logtown for a
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Staff photos by Eliot Kamenitz I
union with her parents fand three half-sisters after she was grown and working in New, Orleans. “ ■%'. k “We all decided to take a house at Waveland Beach" for a month,” says Fountain. “We didn’t think my father would be interested in coming along. He was about 84 at this time, and he surprised us very much by telling us that he would go to Waveland Beach with us. We were pleased because that meant mother could also go.
i “So, when we all got ready to leave, we discovered that 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 think about that in this period of time. But I didn’t think aibout it when I was growing up. We slept with our doors and windows open. We had hooks on the front and back door screens, but that was all. We had no air conditioning in those days, so we had to keep cool, and we kept cool by keeping the windows and doors open.V '	>	j	vj	?
Now that she’s a dyed-in-the-wool city girl, Fountain is astounded that she grew up in a community that had no law enforcement or even a fire station. (	:'	’
,“It seems incredible, but it’s true,” she reflected. "We didn’t have a jail and we didn’t have policemen. I grew Up in a town without all that and survived."	, * ft*
The town’s safety, she says, was in having all the residents ban together for any possible emergency.
“Everybody in town knew when a stranger came through,” she says. “The eyes of the entire community were on him until lie left.„But that was seldom a. problem. Logtown was a place you couldn’t get to if you didn’t know where you were going. Only strangers who were lost ever came there.	^	^	..	-	r
£ “Back in the early days you couldn’t get to Logtown except by boat. There was a road into Logtown and a road.*.* into Pearlington. The mail came to a place called English Lookout, located as far down south into Mississippi as you can go.
“A train dropped the mail off at English Lookout, and it
-was picked up by a boat and brought to a landing, where 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 New 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 day. That’s what we did when I was a little girl.	„	*
_j .“-In the pld days, we didn’t havera resident physician irj Logtown. You had to drive at least 20 miles to go to a doctor dr a dentist, or even a picture show. And that would! he either to Picayune, or Bay St. Louis or Slidell.	i
“My father, as the pharmacist (we had the grocery an<$ "drugstore down by the river), was sort of like the first*; -*aid station of the community. Many a time he had to get up
>	late at night and walk to the store, which was about twq ; miles away, to get medication. Maybe somebody had a very
severe toothache, or maybe there was a baby with a very 1 high, fever, and I canj.see people right now coming to oup house and sitting on the “front porch.and waiting for my father while he went to the store. And my mother woulcj sort of act as a nurse and take care of them until he got back. And I guess that’s how it all rubbed off on me, why |
. got into the medical profession. I’m an X-ray technologist.’*
■ ■ ‘ t' LOGTOWN WAS NOT., populated with 4he stereotypical “country folk” or hillbillies from '.‘Tobacco Road,” sayi Fountain. “All the people who lived there were high minded and cultured,” she says. “Children were expected to go tQ college when they grew up. And the veryrbest traveling shows were .engaged to,, come in and entertain the4 community. Everybody turned out for those. ,r	-j
“It’s always been interesting to me that Logtown seemed like such a small community, bujt the people who went put from* there > j * I don’t know how to explain it,,. but it
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