Anybody ever camp on horn Island by lagoon? A Manhatten Project site

This was my favorite camping spot growing up. Very popular among people from Ocean Springs Biloxi. My buddies and I used to camp there every Memorial day for years until we all had kids.

From Sun Herald
Editor's Notebook — 8.26.12

South Mississippi is a blessed with some wonderful historians. They help gather the stories of our part of the world with insight and understanding, and then give the facts a flow that becomes the narrative of the people and place.

But I expect if you asked them, most of our historians would say that the first draft of South Mississippi history is found in the pages of The Sun Herald or its predecessors, which for more than 128 years have chronicled the news, both big and small, that is part of our history.

Week by week, day by day over those decades, the newsroom of The Sun Herald has reported and compiled the vital information of life on this coastal paradise, from birth to death; the stories of storms and the recovery from them; and all of the troubles and triumphs that have made us who we are.

I thought on all of that news this past week when the National Park Service announced it was closing 30 acres on Horn Island due to hazardous material found there by environmentalists with a BP oil cleanup crew.

At a press conference in Ocean Springs on Monday, Dan Brown, Superintendent of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, said test results showed the presence of asbestos and mustard gas on an acre of the island.

The hazardous materials were associated with a World War II chemical and biological test site used by the Army for wartime experiments.

As Sun Herald reporter Mary Perez dug deeper into the story, she brought out the old file of stories that had appeared through the years in The Sun Herald. The file was more than an inch thick and included yellowed and fragile pages detailing life on Horn Island. From the wild hogs first brought to the island in the 1880s to a pair of red wolves released on the island in 1989, to the story of three bald eagles eaten by alligators on the island in the same year, the clippings revealed the story of a vibrant landscape -- and told of its beauty and life, and of the Coastians who cherished its place in their lives.

But the clippings from the time of the chemical and biological test days are darker, and cloaked, as you might expect, in some secrecy.

"Twenty-six Horn Island property owners had no choice when the government claimed the use of their land for wartime experiments -- in the name of defense and the growing fear of chemical or biological weapons," reporter Kat Bergeron wrote in a 1981 historical piece for the Sunday paper.

Under the heading of government decisions that were perhaps not the best, consider the next revelation in Kat's story: "The barrier island was wrapped in such tight security that few Coast residents realized the dangerous studies were performed at their doorstep. The scientists themselves belatedly discovered that for two-thirds of the year, prevailing winds blew toward the mainland."

The Army's Chemical Warfare Service experiments on Horn Island, it was said, included the injection of live animals with an unknown substance, and then it was believed they were incinerated at the tall chimney that stood until it was felled by Hurricane Frederic in 1979.

The Horn Island testing was moved in 1945 to Utah's Dunway Proving ground, where a release of nerve gas in the late 1960s killed hundreds of sheep, miles away.

Even after Horn Island was abandoned as a test site, visiting the island was discouraged. There were fears some of the test animals might have escaped, and Kat Bergeron quoted M. James Stevens, then-President of the Mississippi Historical Society, as saying, "Nobody knows what was inbred in those animals."

More was revealed in a 1983 article by Jon Frank, this time about the disposal of mustard gas on the island.

In a letter to Sen. Thad Cochran and other state officials, the director of the Army's Nuclear and Chemical Division, Gen. Gerald G. Watson, said 140 German mustard agent bombs were incinerated and buried in an unidentified ravine on the island in July 1946.

"The bombs each weighed 250 pounds and were leaking. They were placed in a shallow trench, with dry wood, pine cones, oil soaked rags and fuel oil, ruptured with rifle fire and ignited, according to an account from Ken Crawford, a public affairs officer in Hunstville."

The letter was in response to a query from Mississippi seeking information about a link to the U.S. government's Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. Watson's letter did not shed light on that question, though other documents had indicated some connection.

His letter did disclose one agent being tested at Horn Island, a botulinum toxin that was being tested as a possible filling for an explosive device.

Then in April 1993, 50 years after the Army's experiments on Horn Island, veterans were released from their promise of silence about activities there, and a Sun Herald article by Sharon Ebner reported what they revealed.

Don Falconer had been sent to the Coast in late 1943 as a young lieutenant to design the testing lab, and he told our reporter how he laid out the initial plant and test area. He said he had designed a grid pattern on which to place equipment to measure the dispersal of the biological agents being tested.

Falconer and others at the test site lived in barracks on a barge in the Pascagoula River. "They had some mighty high brass out there, big-shot officers," he said.

Paul Riley of Maryland, a photographer with the Army Signal Corps, told the newspaper original plans for the Horn Island site were to test infectious diseases such as anthrax and brucellosis, but the man said he did not believe this ever happened.

Army documents showed the testing was scaled back after it became known the prevailing winds could carry infectious bacteria to shore. Instead, the story said, the Army conducted small-scale tests of two toxins -- botulinum toxin which caused botulism, and ricin, a poisonous castor bean protein.

A 1990 Army summary of the Horn Island project said the test subjects included rabbits, goats, cattle and pigs. The most chilling part of this account involves the sudden and mysterious destruction of the records of the Horn Island project.

Mack Cameron, a lawyer in the state Attorney General's Office, was researching land ownership records in the 1980s in preparation for potential lawsuits involving compensation issues surrounding the federal government's taking of the island. He said authorities at Fort Detrich, Md., the Chemical Warfare Service's center, told him they had records of the experiments.

"And lo and behold, I got to Fort Detrich and they tell me they have just destroyed the records pertaining to Horn Island, which I found awfully suspicious. I just found that to be an unbelievable coincidence," he said.

You would agree, I think, and also agree that the old clippings I have placed gingerly back into the Horn Island file contain some very interesting news, as well as an air of mystery that needs further exploration.

[Stan Tiner is Vice-President of SunHerald MultiMedia and Executive Editor of The Sun Herald. Contact him by mail at P.O. Box 4567, Biloxi, MS 39535-4567; fax (228) 896-2104; phone (228) 896-2300; or email, tiner@sunherald.com.]