Logtown, Mississippi is a ghost town located in
Hancock County, Mississippi
Hancock County is the southernmost county of the U.S. state of Mississippi and is named for Founding Father John Hancock. As of the 2010 census, the population was 43,929. Its county seat is Bay St. Louis.
Hancock County is part of the Gulfp ...
. It is one of several ghost towns situated within the 125,000 acre acoustic buffer zone of
NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center
The John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC) is a NASA rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi, United States, on the banks of the Pearl River at the Mississippi–Louisiana border. , it is NASA's largest rocket engine test facility. ...
. It stood along the banks of the
Pearl River
The Pearl River, also known by its Chinese name Zhujiang or Zhu Jiang in Mandarin pinyin or Chu Kiang and formerly often known as the , is an extensive river system in southern China. The name "Pearl River" is also often used as a catch-a ...
and had been the site of a very large
sawmill
A sawmill (saw mill, saw-mill) or lumber mill is a facility where logs are cut into lumber. Modern sawmills use a motorized saw to cut logs lengthwise to make long pieces, and crosswise to length depending on standard or custom sizes (dimensi ...
and logging community.
History
Formerly known as Cabanage Latanier, meaning "
palmetto camp", much of the early European history is unknown. The earliest person to own land in the area was Jean Baptiste Rousseve. In 1788, Rousseve was granted 1000 arpens in the area and built a house at what would become Logtown. In 1805, Rousseve transferred his claim to Joseph Challon, and the Challon name was associated with the town into the twentieth century. As the timber industry built the town into a major population in the nineteenth century, the town was named Logtown.
The town's economy relied on logging and lumber shipping. The first sawmill was built in 1845 by E. G. Goddard of Michigan. In 1889, Henry Weston founded the H. Weston Lumber Company. At the time it was America's largest lumber company, employing 1,200 men, using over 20 barges and four two-masted
schooners, and at its peak supporting a community of over 3,000 people.
In 1906, Logtown had a population of 500 and was home to two churches, two stores, and an
express mail
Express mail is an expedited mail delivery service for which the customer pays a premium for faster delivery. Express mail is a service for domestic and international mail, and is in most nations governed by the country's own postal administration ...
office.
The H. Weston Lumber Company operated in Logtown until 1930. By then, all of the usable and merchantable lumber had been exhausted, and the town population rapidly declined, along with its industrial importance. By 1961, there were about 250 residents. After the construction of the
Stennis Space Center, most of the remaining residents left Logtown.
A post office operated under the name Logtown from 1884 to 1963.
Today
Today, the only thing left untouched is the Logtown cemeteries. There are three privately owned family cemeteries with graves dating back as early as the 1850s. Along the Pearl River you can find an
artesian well and concrete and brick structures that were once the foundations of some of the buildings. Snaking through the pine and hardwood forest is the Possum Walk Trail, a 3 mile hiking trail stretching in between the Nasa Infinity Science Center and Logtown. Along the trail you can find many signs telling Logtown's history and even see remnants of the historic Dummy Line railroad.
References
Notes
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External links
Historical photographs of Logtown
{{Hancock County, Mississippi
Ghost towns in Mississippi
Geography of Hancock County, Mississippi