Almost all the residents of the south side of Adelaide Boulevard are families with children, and almost all the residents of the north side are retired.
This was pure coincidence, Blue Reeves said with a laugh. She and her husband, Bill, retired to Starkville from Jackson in January. Bill grew up in Macon and Blue grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but Blue said their childhood neighborhoods were very similar.
“We grew up running down the street, going from door to door, playing with our neighbors, and we never went inside until the streetlights came on,” Reeves said. “That’s what the children in this neighborhood can do, and that’s why we love it so much.”
That’s exactly what engineer and Starkville native Saunders Ramsey was hoping for when he started the Live Adelaide development company in 2013 and created a master plan for the land between Hollis Creek and South Montgomery Street that has belonged to his family for as long as he can remember.
Ramsey grew up in a different part of the city, adjacent to North Montgomery Street, and remembers being within walking distance of a range of amenities. He wanted to give Adelaide residents the same easy access to things such as a swimming pool and a post office.
“We had the ability to walk down the street to the store, walk to a friend’s house and walk to Moncrief Park,” Ramsey said. “(The Adelaide neighborhood) does bring back some of those memories. There are a lot of communities that used to be designed like that.”
The Adelaide land is named after Ramsey’s grandmother, and almost 900 residential lots could fit on the roughly 400 acres, according to the planning book on the Adelaide website.
“Adelaide is uniquely designed to look and feel as if it naturally evolved over the course of the last century,” the book states. “The development will seamlessly blend residential, commercial, and public spaces with a focus on walkability, beauty, tradition, and a sense of community.”
The post office and pool are already in place, and a chapel and a community farm will be part of future phases of development, Ramsey said.
The Starkville board of aldermen on Tuesday approved the division of about 17 acres into 46 lots, the third and largest phase of the Adelaide project so far. The first phase built 18 houses with nine on each side of Adelaide Boulevard in 2017 and 2018, and the second phase built 33 more houses to the north.
Some of the houses in the second phase are still under construction, but all 51 houses have either residents or contracts in place, and 14 of the 46 lots in phase three already have option contracts, Ramsey said. He expects construction of the third phase, to the west of the existing houses, to begin in early 2021.
The neighborhood’s architecture is “uniquely southern Louisiana,” according to the Adelaide website, with three types of houses: Creole, Acadian and French colonial.
The Claiborne at Adelaide, a retirement community that opened five years ago, sits just south of the residential area. Its 82 units cover 81,460 square feet, with assisted living areas occupying roughly 59,000 of those square feet and two- and three-bedroom cottages on the remaining 21,000 square feet.
The Claiborne was not part of the initial plan for the Adelaide area, Ramsey said, but the Jackson-based Blake Management Group was hoping to establish a senior living community in Starkville, and Adelaide turned out to be a good place for it.
“We presented them our master plan and found a way to fit them in,” Ramsey said.
The development could keep growing over time until it is full, depending on the real estate market, he said.
“We’re doing it a little bit at a time so we are conservative and kind of understand the market,” he said.
‘Within two weeks, we knew everybody’
Blue Reeves and her husband do not golf, she said, but they own a golf cart and enjoy driving it around the undeveloped area west of the neighborhood with their grandchildren, Mason and Caroline Reeves, when they come from Jackson to visit.
Two of the Reeves’ neighbors, Lee Woods and Charlotte Corley, were out walking Corley’s dog Jake on Friday afternoon when Mason and Caroline asked to pet the dog, and the three adults stopped to chat for a few minutes.
They all told The Dispatch they appreciate the inherent tight-knit qualities of the Adelaide community.
“The post office is this communal space, so it gets you out of your house, and when you get your mail, you run into your neighbors,” Corley said.
Woods said she is excited about the prospect of a community farm and walking trails as the neighborhood develops. She and her husband were two of the neighborhood’s first residents, moving from Houston, Texas in May 2018.
Both are Mississippi State University alumni, as are most of the Adelaide residents, including Corley.
“The one thing that draws us all back here is the university,” she said. “We all have this passion for Mississippi State.”
Corley and her husband had always been planning to retire to Starkville, and they moved to the Adelaide neighborhood from Madison earlier this year.
“We moved here in the middle of COVID,” she said. “In May, the weather was perfect, and everybody spent time on their front porches. Within two weeks, we knew everybody in the neighborhood.”
She and Woods became close friends quickly and take regular walks together.
“Even though we’ve known each other six months, I feel like I’ve known her a lifetime,” Corley said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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