Oliver v. United States

RIDDICK, Circuit Judge.

This is one of the so-called Weldon Springs cases which arose out of the efforts of the War Department to acquire by purchase a site in St. Charles County, Missouri, for the location of an ordnance plant. After having accepted approximately 270 contracts with individual landowners for the purchase of their lands, the War Department conceived the idea that the contracts were prohibited by statute, and acting upon this assumption caused condemnation proceedings to be instituted in the name of the, United States against all landowners whose contracts had not been fully…