U.S. told to pay for land it seized

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Camp Breckinridge tracts are involved

By James Malone
jmalone@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal


Fearing coastal attacks during the early fever pitch of World War II, the Army took 36,000 acres of rolling farmland in Western Kentucky's Union and Webster counties to build Camp Breckinridge in 1942 to train soldiers.

Hundreds of families had to leave, mistakenly believing they might be allowed to buy back their property someday.

Now a federal judge has ruled that about 1,000 landowners and descendants are due $32 million in profits that the government made in 1965 by selling the land's mineral rights to oil, coal and power companies.

>snip

The people who sold their property or had it condemned did not learn the government had reaped financial benefits off the mineral rights until 1964 -- when an article about the sales appeared in the Union County Advocate.

more:http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050406/NEWS0104/504060456/1008/NEWS01

This is an article written by David Nickell, a Sociolgy professor from Paducah Community College. It details what happened to the people who had their land taken from them to create Land Between the Lakes.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:uTGRcZvsapUJ:nickell.tierranet.com/tales/lbl.pdf+land+between+the+lakes&hl=en

You might want to read the pdf version to skip the highlighted words.