Kingsbury Munitions Factory
Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in Indiana was one of the fastest created munitions factories in United States history. When the country entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, the War Department needed enormous capacity to manufacture explosives and ammunition. The land was chosen in LaPorte County and Starke County because it was flat, close to rail lines, and was considered safe for a remote high-explosive site. But that decision came at human cost. More than 250 local farm families received formal notice that they had to vacate their homes and farms within thirty days. In some cases barns, silos, livestock yards, and orchards had been on that land for generations. The families had to take whatever compensation they were offered, move quickly, and watch the bulldozers come in so the area could be flattened. The final footprint was huge. Kingsbury covered more than 13,000 acres and included not just factories but blast zones, storage bunkers, barricaded earth mounds, and miles of rail spurs.
Construction happened at a speed that today barely seems believable. The ground was broken in 1940, and within the next few years the population of the plant workforce grew into the tens of thousands. At the very peak of the war effort Kingsbury employed roughly 20,000 people at once, and 70 percent of them were women. This mirrored a national trend; as men went to combat, women took over production. Most of these women had never worked industrial jobs before. They were trained on site. Their tasks included pressing TNT blocks, filling artillery shells, loading powder into .30 caliber and .50 caliber cartridges, and packing ammunition in crates. The plant produced small arms ammunition in vast quantities for rifles and machine guns, and also produced medium caliber ammunition and explosive burster charges. Kingsbury was one of the biggest suppliers of .30 and .50 caliber rounds in the country, and the output was measured in billions. Much of the ammunition that went to North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and the Pacific islands was manufactured by women in northern Indiana.
The factory operated day and night, seven days a week. Safety practices were rigid because the entire production area was surrounded by dangerous materials. Workers wore antistatic clothing. They had strict rules about hair pins, jewelry, and tobacco because a spark could trigger an explosion. There were blast berms between bunkers, and the industrial buildings were spaced far apart so an accident in one would not instantly set off the others.
When the war ended, the need for mass ammunition collapsed almost overnight. Thousands of workers were swiftly laid off. The plant reduced activity but did not shut entirely. During the Korean War the huge plant was partly reactivated, though at a smaller scale than the Second World War years. After that, different portions of the land were transferred between government agencies. Some parts were used for storage. Eventually large areas became nature areas, with wildlife returning to what had been lethal industrial ground. Today the Kingsbury area is partly a state fish and wildlife preserve and partly industrial park land. Only foundations and a few remaining earth mounds and concrete magazines hint at the enormous emergency factory that once generated such firepower. The site is both a historic symbol of national wartime mobilization and a reminder that thousands of ordinary American households were disrupted so that the country could produce the ammunition it needed to win a global war.
