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Show Real 'Boom Town9 Rises in Wasteland HOLLY RIDGE, N. C. Four months ago you could have bought all the land you wanted around here for three or four dollars an acre unless you happened to be dealing with a native whose conscience would not allow him to accept such an exhorbitant price. Today this same land is being sold in 20 foot lots and for serious money, too. No, nobody has discovered oil in these parts. This just happens to be the place the federal government picked for the army's new anti-aircraft training camp, now under construction. There is good farm land both to the north and south of Holly Ridge but the real estate In this immediate vicinity is little more than a scrub-timbered scrub-timbered waste. But the U. S. army had other ideas. The section is not only easily accessible by highway high-way and railroad, but offers an ideal spot over which to shoot anti-aircraft guns without danger of hitting anyone on land or sea. The shape of the coast and the lay of the land is well suited to the army's purpose. pur-pose. Guns will fire out into Onslow bay, wide coastal indenture many miles from the lanes of coastwise shipping. Naturally the government didn't suffer from Holly Ridge's new land boom. In the first place, the price didn't rise until the army had acted and, in the second, the government has the right of condemnation. So its two-mile frontage on U. S. highway high-way No. 17 and all the territory between be-tween here and the ocean came cheap enough. It's the land adjacent to the reservation that's suddenly become so valuable. In November the entire population of the cross roads of Holly Ridge and for a mile in every direction totaled 28. This summer, according to government plans, there will be 20.000 troops stationed here. Already there are several thousand men building the camp and the trailer camps in which many of them live stretch up and down the highway for miles. Pine plank stores and bunk houses spring up over night and business is booming on every hand. How long it all will last nebody knows. |