Temporary exhibit at Wilmington City Hall honors lives of former Joliet Arsenal workers

Ike Widner’s father, Merle, was just 16 when he worked at the former Joliet Ammunition Plant, mowing grass on top of hundreds of bunkers, which stored the ammunitions.

Widner of Morris and Larry Libersher of Wilmington, both trustees with the Wilmington Area Historical Society, have put together a temporary exhibit of World War II artifacts at Wilmington City Hall, located at 1165 Water St.

People may view the exhibit through July 30 during city hall’s regular office hours. Items include an array of artifacts on loan from Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, part of the site of the former arsenal.

Those items include stamps, fire hose nozzle, officer security badge from the Elwood Ordinance Plant, work gloves, employee identification badges, pocket-sized plant personnel directories and a “U.S. Army Restricted Area” sign.

“We need to keep the arsenal alive to give honor to the men and woman who fought for this country and their wives who worked at the arsenal to protect us from the enemy for the future generations of the children of today,” Widner said.

Libersher agreed. But he also feels no one will ever know all of the stories from those days.

“There’s a lot of secrets that lie between the walls of the arsenal,” Libersher said.

Good neighbors and good stewards

Joe Wheeler, prairie archaeologist and heritage program manager for Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, said Widner had approached him with his vision and Wheeler tried to find the best items to make that come alive.

Wheeler said because Midewin maintains good connections with organizations like the Manhattan Historical Society, the Elwood Historical Society, the Wilmington Historical Society and the Will County Historical Society, Midewin is often the first place people turn with items – such as badges – from family members who’d worked at the arsenal.

“These things come to us,” Wheeler said. “We try to act as good stewards of it.”

How did an ammunition plant come to the Joliet area?

From farmland to federal land

Wheeler said when the U.S. government began buying land to create ammunition plants, the Joliet Association of Commerce sent an attorney and a lobbyist to Washington D.C. in the hopes of bringing one of those plants to the Will County area.

The U.S. was still coming out of the Depression and the unemployment rate in Will County was around 15% and a large number of people were on relief, Wheeler said.

The area that became the Joliet Ammunition Plant in 1940 was attractive to the government for several reasons, Wheeler said. It was flat and inexpensive as it, near a good transportation hub (trains and highway) and had a water supply, which was needed in the manufacture of explosives, Wheeler said.

“It also needed to be far enough from a major population center in case something went wrong,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler said a big explosion did happen on June 6, 1942, which killed 48 people instantly.

The Midewin website said “the federal government purchased 36,645 acres from local farmers at a cost of $8,175,815. Construction costs totaled over $81 million.”

The Joliet Army Ammunition Plant was actually two separate “GOCO,” which meant “Government Owned Contractor Operated,” Wheeler said.

During World War II, the government built 77 of these GOCO plants; six of these plants were in Illinois, and two of the six – KOW and EOP – comprising two of the six, Wheeler said.

The Kankakee Ordnance Works (KOW) was located on the west side of Route 53 and manufactured raw explosives and components of explosives. These were mostly TNT “but also DNT, toluene, sellite, lead azide and other chemicals associated with explosive manufacture,” Wheeler said in an email.

The east side of Route 53 was the Elwood Ordnance Plant (EOP) was located on the east side of Route 53. This plant “loaded munitions such as bombs, artillery shells, explosive blocks, and mines; and components such as fuzes, boosters and primers,” Wheler said in an email.

“The metal overpass crossing above Route 53 – the “Route 66A” – carried the raw explosives from the West Side where they were manufactured, to the east side where they were loaded into finished munitions and components,” Wheeler wrote in an email. “Not all of the explosives were used locally, a lot of it was sent other plants throughout the country.”

Wheeler said part of the reason why keeping the history of the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant alive is the because of the monumental changes it brought to the area and its labor force: a farming community became an exurb and women and African Americans were integrated into the work force.

“That’s a big change: from 225 farm families to 21,000 full-time workers,” Wheeler said.

In 1945, the Kankakee and Elwood plants were “combined and redesignated as the Joliet Arsenal,” and operations were placed on standby, according to the Midewin website.

Remediation and redevelopment

Wheeler said the arsenal was reactivated during the Korean War and the Vietnam. Operations ceased by the late 1970s for the most part and the arsenal was deemed inactive in 1993, he said. The total size at the time was 23,543 acres, the website said.

At this point, the area was remediated and redeveloped, Wheeler said. The Illinois Land Conservation Act of 1995 set up the transfer of the property, where Midewin now stands, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he said.

Wheeler said Midewin, in turn, is to conserve and restore native fish, plants and wildlife. A news release from Midewin said staff and volunteers are working to reintroduce more than 275 species of native Illinois prairie plants.

Midewin stands on just 18,000 of those original 36,000 acres, Wheeler said. Other parts went to an Army trainer center, two industrial parks, Will County Landfill, Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery and intermodal centers, he added.

Wheeler said many people believe the government hid the bunkers – or “igloos,” as Wheeler likes to call them – under dirt and by planting grass over them as protection from enemy spy planes. But they’re actually “pretty hard to miss,” Wheeler said in an email.

“They were finished like that because the earth added further layer of insulation and the inside of the bunkers maintain a pretty constant temperature and humidity – and when you’re talking about raw high explosives and finished bombs, you want that,” Wheeler wrote. “Also, the tons of earth held together with developed root systems of the grasses also served as an additional dampening should there be an explosion in one of them. With up to a half million pounds of explosives in each one, that too, was important.”

Midewin is slowly removing hundreds of bunkers but, in the meantime, they give visitors who stand on them the “best view of the prairie,” Wheeler wrote in an email.

For more information, visit the Wilmington Historical Society at wilmingtonhistory.org and Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie at fs.usda.gov.