In January 1942, a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, low-flying airplanes began appearing in the skies between Springfield and Decatur. Soon, farmers in the area were told they'd have 30 days to leave their land and urged to take as much personal property as they could in that time.
They objected, saying their land was among the top 5% in the country for production of corn, wheat and soybeans.
"We were told to raise food to win this war," farmer Harry E. Pickrell told the Chicago Tribune at the time. "Then this thing comes up."
"This thing" was a giant ordnance plant -- nearly 20,000 acres stretching almost 4 miles along U.S. 36 in western Sangamon County, about 60 miles west of Champaign-Urbana. The plant was to be built on land that was flat, far away from coastlines, close to the Wabash Railroad and Illinois Terminal interurban lines, and reasonably near a motherlode of prospective workers in Springfield (population 75,500) and Decatur (60,000).
Remnants of the armament plant are still visible today, some 80 years later, a few hundred yards north of Interstate 72 near Illiopolis, where in the distance motorists can see a water tower, a number of slowly decaying buildings and "igloos," half-buried structures where explosives at the plant were stored.
Less than a year after a federal court approved an application from the War Department to take the land from farmers by eminent domain, a virtual city had been built there.
"Well, the federal agent came by and my dad was shingling the house, and he said, 'Don't work on the house anymore, because you're going to have to move,'" John Lyon of Illiopolis told an oral historian in 1989.
The ordnance plant, estimated to have cost $35 million to build (almost $700 million in today's dollars), included assembly lines, police and fire stations, stables for the horses used at the plant, a hospital, a cafeteria, water and sewer systems, a network of roads and rail sidings, security fences, a new interurban station, a day-care center, barracks for some of the workers and those all-important igloos.
"It's just unbelievable what the United States can do, even military or anyway when they decide to make up their mind," said Phelps Sheller in 1989, 47 years after he worked at the plant as a high-schooler, making 75 cents an hour loading boxes of shells onto trucks. "I'm not going to say it's going to be the cheapest or the most efficient, but that plant was very, very well built."
The Sangamon Ordnance Plant, which employed 9,700 people at the peak of its short, three-year life, initially was two separate plants. One, on the north side of U.S. 36, was the Oak Ordnance Plant operated by Johnson & Johnson. On the south side was the Sangamon Ordnance Plant operated by Remington Rand. By September 1943, the plants were merged under Remington Rand.
Because so many men were gone from central Illinois to fight the war, newspaper advertisements appealed to women to seek employment at the plant. One that ran in the Decatur Daily Review a few weeks after D-Day in 1944 stressed that "women in all walks of life" were employed there: housewife, club woman, schoolteacher, sales lady and wives of servicemen.
"We need more women at once," said the full-page ad. It referred to "good wages" and "pleasant working conditions," ignoring the fact that dangerous explosives were all around the facility.
"Well we couldn't have no metal on us. We wore steel-toed shoes and we had to use string on our hair, you couldn't have no bobby pins or nothing," Dora Welch, who worked on a line stuffing shells with powder, told an interviewer in 1990. "We were working with live shell, afraid of sparks, et cetera. They wouldn't let us have anything like that out on the line. We changed clothes and we were in uniform, little old unbleached muslin uniforms, and our clothes was left in the change house."
For that dangerous work she was paid 70 cents an hour (equivalent to about $12.50 today). But, she added, she saved $3,000 in a short time.
"Because you couldn't go anyplace and you couldn't do anything. All you did was eat and sleep," Welch said.
Not everyone was so disciplined, however.
"I know that while this plant was at its peak, there was a lot of money spent in our city," Paul Hohenstein of Illiopolis said in 1989. "One thing that seemed odd to me was there was five or six taverns in our little town, and I could almost point them out to you, and they were rowdy all the time."
He said that his father allowed him to play pool at one boisterous place, "and it was really almost like a Wild West town. It was really kind of rough. You'd have drunks laying in the street in late hours and especially in the summertime. My gosh, it was going on until one or two o'clock in the morning."
The bulk of the workers -- an estimated 70 percent of whom were women -- lived in Springfield, Decatur, Illiopolis or other nearby towns in a 30-mile radius. Most either carpooled or took the rickety interurban trains (a round trip ticket was 35 cents, or about $6.25 today). Little Illiopolis became stretched to its limits.
"If you had seen Illiopolis in 1940 and 1941, it was a little town of six or seven hundred people, and if you would have seen it in 1942, you would have never believed what happened here," said Herb Lee, who began working at the plant in 1942. "There was people living in anything they could live in. They had tents pitched. Everybody in town had a room rented out."
But almost as quickly as it all began, it all ended.
"All production ceased abruptly with the announcement of V-J Day," wrote Virginia Walgren in a 2013 master's thesis on the Sangamon plant. "The announcement came after the employees of the first shift had returned home for the day on 14 August 1945. Radio announcements, which were authorized by the plant's general manager, B.B. Bond, were made that night authorizing a two-day holiday. When workers returned on Friday, 95 percent of them were laid off."
The Chicago Tribune reported that all 4,000 people working at the plant in August 1945 would be out of jobs within three months. The same thing was occurring all over the state: 17,500 workers at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Park Ridge, 7,800 at the Buick Aircraft plant in Melrose Park, 50,000 steelworkers at plants throughout the area, all soon to be unemployed in defense industries.
In September 1945, the Sangamon Ordnance Plant was turned over to the War Assets Administration for disposal and warehousing. By the end of the year, 32 large tracts of land at the Sangamon site were sold back to former owners. And by January 1948, several buildings and facilities at the site were sold to new businesses, including International Textiles Co. and DeKalb Hybrid Seed Co.
Today, most of the property has been returned to agriculture, except for an unknown number of acres that remain fenced off, either because of contamination from the ordnance plant or from a 2004 Formosa Plastics plant explosion at virtually the same site.
Sangamon was no ordinary war-production plant. In 1943, it was awarded the Army-Navy "E" banner, which went to only about 5 percent of the 85,000 companies that produced materials for the war effort.
"Starting from scratch, you people in a new plant have accomplished a miracle of production," said James H. Rand Jr., president and chairman of the board of Remington Rand. "Anyone who has watched you work on the lines knows that you are doing your share for victory -- a victory that our boys are going to win a year from today."
Rand's prediction was optimistic by more than a year, but not for lack of effort at the Sangamon Ordnance Plant.
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