Illiopolis tested by explosion in workforce

The U.S. urgently needed many things when the attack on Pearl Harbor threw it into World War II. Among them was artillery ammunition, and millions of those shells ultimately were produced on former farm fields near Illiopolis.

But construction of the Sangamon and Oak Ordnance Plants tested both public resolve and official ingenuity, starting when 15,000 construction workers flooded the area.

“The housing problem in Illiopolis itself is almost beyond conception,” the Illinois State Journal reported in August 1942. “As one official put it, ‘even the park benches’ are eyed longingly by the war workers. Officials said not one home in that village is available for rent.

“The village has blossomed into a huge trailer camp, with townsfolk renting out almost every inch of available space for trailer use. It was estimated that about 400 trailers are located in or near the village.”

Paul Hohenstein, who was a child when the plants were built, remembered in 1998 that the influx of workers had another effect on his hometown.

“There was five or six taverns in our little town … and they were rowdy all the time. I know there was a pool hall up above where Sam Rogers’ store is now, his antique shop, and it was quite interesting.

‘They had pretty important people out of Decatur and from all over come up there to gamble, and it was really almost like a wild west town. You’d see drunks laying in the street in late hours and especially in the summertime, my gosh, it was going until one or two o’clock in the morning.”

Some people worried that “Okies” would migrate to central Illinois in search of defense jobs, a fear Illinois State Journal columnist A.L. Bowen tried to squelch in May 1942.

From the start, he wrote, “it was the plan to draw all the employees within a radius of fifty miles, so that most of them could come from their homes and return to them each day. … There will be some trailer camp population, but I doubt that it will ever be large enough to be serious, either during production or after it ceases.

Bowen was right. The ordnance plants’ labor pool ultimately was concentrated in an area generally bounded by Springfield, Decatur, Taylorville and Lincoln.

Five on-site dormitories accommodated about 800 people; a shared room was $3.50 a week. The plant’s top supervisors lived in 40 two-story homes, which remain private residences today.

But the thousands of other ordnance workers commuted, most on special trains running on the Illinois Terminal Railroad’s old Interurban line, which paralleled U.S. 36 between Springfield and Decatur.

The first official Victory Special train — 11 passenger cars with 500 riders, pulled by a red, white and blue locomotive — left Springfield’s IT station on Clear Lake Avenue on Nov. 29, 1942. A single trip was 20 cents, while a weekly discount ticket was $1.50.

Plant management, constantly needing more workers, tried a variety of hiring incentives: good pay, health insurance and flexible schedules, along with recreation programs, a cafeteria, chatty newsletters and — an innovation for the time — even child care.

It all worked. The plants turned out 24 million artillery shells between 1942 and 1945. Despite the high explosives involved, only two workers died in production-line accidents, and ordnance employees received four awards for excellence.

The plant largely reverted to farmland after V-J Day, and most of its 2,000 buildings were dismantled and sold at bargain prices. Only a few dozen structures still stand west of Illiopolis. (Virtually all are privately owned and not accessible to the public.)

— Interested people can read much more about the Sangamon Ordnance Plant at SangamonLink.org, the online encyclopedia of the Sangamon County Historical Society. Search for “Sangamon Ordnance” on the home page.