![]() ![]() Visit to sign up for her free weekly newsletter.By Don Coble, COVE SPRINGS - Adam Hartle planned to put a historic marker on the only empty lot in Edgewater Landing where the legendary Hell House once stood. Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of Let Me Tell You Something. Next week: In the third installment of this four part series on Lynyrd Skynyrd band, you’ll meet people who were first to scene. You’re goin’ to get to meet one of the rescuers.” The kind who always want to do the right thing. It is very much the evidence of the compassionate hearts of many common heroes. In a quiet, obscure place in the middle of the rural South is more than just a row of monuments to plane crash victims. In October 2019, they unveiled the tribute site to a crowd of hundreds including folks who were on the plane and family members such as Judy Van Zant, Ronnie’s widow, their daughter and grandchildren. It was immediately pulled and the cover replaced. Days earlier, the band’s last album, Street Survivors, had released, showing the band standing in midst of fire. The walkway is a replica from the album jacket, One More For the Road. In front of us were several astonishingly beautiful, tall black monuments, including one for each who died: band founder Ronnie Van Zant, musician Steve Gaines, his sister and backup singer, Cassie Gaines, (their mother died in a car accident two years after her children were killed), assistant road manager, Dean Kilpatrick, and pilots, Walter McCreary and William Gray.Ī local man, Bobby McDaniel, headed up a volunteer effort which raised $64,000 for the tributes including six steps that lead up between the monuments. In middle of a piney wood thicket, Randy pulled to a stop on a lightly graveled path. “The victims had so many family members who came and they wanted to meet all the first responders and those who were caring for them,” Mary commented. I have never seen this to be a truer statement of fact than in Gillsburg/McComb where farmers, loggers, ranchers, housewives and a volunteer fire department rushed into the swamp that night - a place filled with deadly copperheads - eager to help the dead and dying. When I came down to the lobby to meet the Dickersons, they introduced Mary Thornton. Now, much of the timber has been harvested and replaced with the smell of long, narrow chicken houses. Somewhere in Amite County, Miss., near the tiny town of Gillsburg is the place where one of the most famous crashes in music history happened one night around 6 p.m.īack then, it was mostly thick timber with small farms scattered about. It requires turning off a major road onto a black top road that leads to another old black top back road that has crumbled mostly to dirt. The Dickersons kindly agreed and, thank goodness for that, because I don’t know that we would ever have found the spot. The band was minutes away from Baton Rouge, La., where they were to perform at LSU. 20, 1977, when their plane ran out of gas. ![]() I had a better plan: Visiting the swamp land where the Southern rock group, Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed on Oct. Lisa and Randy Dickerson were being hospitable when they invited us to lunch and/or church in McComb, Miss. Editor note: This is the second installment in a four-part series.
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