United States Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune
In the year 1941, the United States Government began building Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, the largest amphibious base in the country. To gain the property for the base, Eminent Domain was enforced condemning the lands of many Verona residents, some of which lost land that had been in their families for over a century. In a personal account by Myrtle Margaret Fisher published in The Heritage of Onslow County, she said:
They (her parents Joseph Cephus Fisher and Sarah Margaret Swinson Fisher) made their home at Maple Hill for several years and some of the children were born there but most of us were born at Verona on the “Old Fisher Place” which has long since grown up and abandoned. After their move to the Loop Road of Verona, which was across the tracks on property purchased from Mama’s brother Vannie, four more children were born making us a family of four children. Eventually our farm became a self supporting one. Unknowingly, we would live on condemned property in the Stump Sound Township, where the U.S. Government had preconceived ideas of building a very large military complex on the coastal waters of our county for the training of soldiers. It would later become the largest amphibious base in the world. Time passed with many attempts to obtain a better price than my parents were offered for the farm and acreage, so Daddy was forced to sell to the government. The sale was finalized on October 30, 1941. It was disbursed as follows: for the 210 acres of land: $2505.00, dwelling: $800.00, barn: $200.00, smoke house: $35.00, poultry house: $5.00, two tobacco barns: $200.00, and for all the timber they were paid $600.00. This wasn’t nearly enough for the farm and timber but there was nothing else they felt could be done as they had several meetings with government officials with no let-up on price.
Following the building of Camp Lejeune many families were put in situations like Ms. Myrtle Fisher’s family, with no house, and no land and very little compensation for the property they were forced to sell to the government. A major problem was that when the base came, it brought industry to Jacksonville, increasing the value of the land. So the displaced persons that had to sell to the government were now looking for new land with very little money, and property prices much, much higher. It took most individuals two to five years to resettle, and some had to leave the county completely to find property.
Read more about this topic: Verona, North Carolina
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, marine, corps, base, camp and/or lejeune:
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The admission of the States of Wyoming and Idaho to the Union are events full of interest and congratulation, not only to the people of those States now happily endowed with a full participation in our privileges and responsibilities, but to all our people. Another belt of States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“People run away from the name subsidy. It is a subsidy. I am not afraid to call it so. It is paid for the purpose of giving a merchant marine to the whole country so that the trade of the whole country will be benefitted thereby, and the men running the ships will of course make a reasonable profit.... Unless we have a merchant marine, our navy if called upon for offensive or defensive work is going to be most defective.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. This agglomeration which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep searched with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We could not well camp higher, for want of fuel; and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too, like a good citizen of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrification of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion’s little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.”
—Caroline Lejeune (1897–1973)