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Chapter 9. A Journey back to Nature
- Texas A&M University Press
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134 A Journey back to Nature On September 25, 2010, as part of its Texas in World War II initiative , the Texas Historical Commission dedicated an Official Texas Historical Marker at the site of the former Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant near Caddo Lake in the East Texas hamlet of Karnack. With a cast of characters ranging from scientists and US Army officials to Russian generals and rock-and-roll stars, the full story of the 8,000-acre Longhorn site is one of both international significance and local determination. For more than half a century the site housed a manufacturing facility for war materiel and weapons of mass destruction. But following more than a decade of work by state and federal agencies, local organizations, and many tenacious individuals, it ultimately became a quiet place of refuge for endangered wildlife and an outdoorclassroom dedicated to environmental education and tourism. The journey from natural setting to industrialization and back to nature included many twists and turns along the way. Anglo settlement of the area around Karnack—previously occupied by generations of Native Americans, principally the Caddos— began in the late nineteenth century. One early settler, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, opened a general store in the village in the 1890s and soon afterwards began amassing large real estate holdings in the region. Reportedly the largest landowner in Harrison County by 1930, he donated land to the State of Texas in 1934 for the creation of Caddo Lake State Park. Taylor’s daughter Claudia Alta— better known as Lady Bird—married Lyndon Baines Johnson that same year.1 In late 1941, as the US government began preparations for entry into the Second World War, plans for construction of a major 9 A Journey BACK to nAture 135 ordnance facility in East Texas began to take shape. On December 15, 1941—eight days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, precipitated a declaration of war—the US War Department announced that the new munitions plant would be built in Karnack . As historian Gail Beil wrote, “This was not a random choice. At the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson was a US Representative from Texas and a favorite of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Johnson ’s wealthy, influential father-in-law . . . happened to own a great deal of the land involved and assisted in the purchase of much of the rest.”2 Originally named Longhorn Ordnance Works, the facility was one of sixty government-owned, contractor-operated plants built in the United States just before and during World War II. Construction began in the spring of 1942 and was completed by July 1943. More than three hundred structures stood on the site, including administration buildings, production facilities, shops, heating and cooling plants, and magazines. The Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis signed on as contractor in charge of operations and brought in more than fifteen hundred employees. Inevitably, a housing shortage arose in the Aerial view of the plant at Longhorn Ordnance Works shortly after construction. Courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service. [44.204.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:18 GMT) 136 ChApter 9 area, and the neighborhood of hastily built homes that sprang up in nearby Marshall for the Monsanto workers became known locally as Yankee Stadium. With the plant quickly operating at full capacity, production of the explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT) quickly reached 360,000 pounds per day. By the end of the war in August 1945,TNT production at the Longhorn plant totaled more than 400 million pounds. Designated a standby facility by the US Army in early 1946, the plant maintained a small contingent of Monsanto staff engaged in cleanup work until the army took over operations that summer and assigned three officers and some eighty-five civilian workers to the facility.3 In 1952, with the US involvement in the Korean War, the government ordered the facility, then known as Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant (LAAP), back into production with a new operations contract awarded to the Universal Match Corporation of St. Louis. The company, which had supplied aircraft signal flares to US forces during World War II, assembled a new production plant at the Karnack site by renovating existing structures and building forty new ones to manufacture propellant fuel and to assemble pyrotechnic ammunition, including “photoflash bombs, ground signals, simulators , and shell tracer elements.”4 With the plant once again relegated to standby status following the end of the Korean War, the ammunition manufacturing activities ceased, but soon a new use...