Stennis Space Center, MS news and local guide

The chosen land was thinly settled, but about 700 families still had to move. Five small communities, Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa and Westonia, plus the northern part of Pearlington, were cleared, and more than 3,200 parcels with 786 homes, 16 churches, 19 stores and three schools were acquired. Some of these towns were old: Napoleon began in 1767 as a British land grant to John Claudius Favre, and Logtown, founded in 1848, was home to the Weston Lumber Company, one of the largest lumber mills in the country in the 1920s. The test site covers about 13,500 acres, surrounded by a 125,000-acre buffer zone, and remnants of the old towns survive inside it. The site was designated NASA Mississippi Test Operations on December 18, 1961, and renamed the Mississippi Test Facility on July 1, 1965. Its stands test-fired the first and second stages of the Saturn V moon rockets, and from 1971 every Space Shuttle main engine was flight-certified here. It became the National Space Technology Laboratories on June 14, 1974, and on May 20, 1988, it was renamed for Mississippi senator and space program supporter John C. Stennis. Sources Wikipedia: John C. Stennis Space Center The Historical Marker Database: Logtown; Napoleon (Mississippi Department of Archives and History)