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When ouier space meant less living space...
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Sentiment Gives Way To Reality
At Mississippi Test Facility
By DAVID ZINMAN
GAINESVILLE, Miss. (AP) — Louise Eliz-.beth Loveless sits in the tin-roofed country ome near the banks of the Pearl River and alks about the good old days.
To Mrs. Loveless, they are the days before Vashington decided to build a $500 million ocket test center in the sleepy backwoods of outhem Mississippi.
The base — a vital link in the race to the noon — is wiping out her home, her country tore, and the antebellum town of Gainesville, wpulation of about 100. Everything, even Gainesville's ancient graveyard which ex-sted before Mississippi became a state in 817, is being uprooted.
In two years, the nearby communities of ybgtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, Westonia, Bayou la Croix and Flat Top also will become [host towns, erased rom the map to nake man’s ageless iream of a trip to the noon come true.
“What makes it so )ad is that we'll be rtarting all over,”
VIrs. Loveless, 56,
>aid. She is one of a lalf dozen families eft in Gainesville.
The government iays she must get out Dy Thursday (Jan.
10).
‘‘Everything De different,” she said, strolling in her spacious yard among xnturies-old moss hung oaks. “All the old plaices we love will just be memories.
“Just the other day,” she said, “I walked jver by the river where we held baptisms. My father was the preacher. I remember the ieacons would march the people out into the river. Daddy stood in the water, and we would be on the shore singing hymns while Daddy read scripture. Oh my, it was such a beautiful oeremony.”
The land the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is taking consists of
141,000	acres — about 220 square miles — of Elat, pine timberland and swamp in Hancock and Pearl River counties. Miss., and St. Tammany Parish, La.
On a mvemment maD. the rocket area
Gainesville without a penny.
Mrs. Jones said the government won't pay her because she can’t prove clear title to the land where she lived 32 years and raised eight children. The $18,700 she says the government has offered is tied up in court until she can legally show it’s her land.
“The title has a Mrs. M.E. Clark on it," Mrs. Jones said. “We never heard of her before all this . . . we've been trying to find some of the heirs . . . but they’re not to be found.”
A good many people feel the government’s terms, by and large, have been fair.
“At first there was a big furore over land prices," said Charles Nutter, publisher of The Picayune Item. Picayune lies on the northern outskirts of the buffer zone. It is due to become one of a half dozen boom towns when the base’s workers flock in.
“But the furore died down," Nutter said. “The prices the government paid seem pretty well in line.”
Moore said his office got together with 70 per cent of the property owners who held 96 per cent of the test site land. But hold-outs and a small group of land owners in the buffer zone are not satisfied.
“The government men are very nice, very courteous,” said Cora Pearl Patch, 54, one of Mrs. Loveless’ three sisters, “but they say we’re looking at this from a sentimental viewpoint. It seems like they don’t think our land is worth much. Most of the people who lived in Gainesville were not satisfied.
“All of us respect the owners’ sentimental value,” real estate boss Moore said. “But what we are concerned with is what this property can bring on the open market. The fact that they have been living there for generations and generations has no material bearing on fair market value.”
One of the more outspoken protesters was Dr. J.F. Farguson, a gentleman fanner who owned 300 acres in the buffer zone and who
“I'm 60 years old,” McQueen said. “I can’t start all over in business. I've built a trade for years and years. Now, they're taking my business. They're taking all my customers. And all they're looking at is my reed estate.”
“No condemning agency can compensate for business losses,” Graham said. “That’s called ‘consequential damages.’ There’s no way the government can pay for this.
“We — probably more than anyone else — are aware of the hardships these people go through. The hardest job is to soothe people who are disturbed, not necessarily by the price, but by the hardship of leaving, relocating in a new community, a new environment There’s only one explanation we can make
—	'these things we recognize, we sympathize. But they are not compensable under the law'.”
Slowly, tract by tract, the long process of buying goes on.
Each week another family picks up and leaves. A house full of memories goes down board by board. Or sometimes, you see a house mover inching an old frame dwelling along a piney woods road.
Coffins come up from the Mississippi red clay of Gainesville Cemetery to be reburied in strange graveyards.	.
Gainesville is gone. By mid-1964, half a dozen more tiny settlements will join it in limbo. The lush woodland that once surrounded these communities will never be the same.
“I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the scenery,” Dr. Werner von Braun, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, said while flying over the land.
“I feel a little sorry over the fact that bulldozers will soon be going over the area and tearing up some of that beauty... (BUT) if we didn’t come to Gainesville, we’d never get to the moon."
—Reprinted from The Daily Herald, January 5, 1963