June 1941: US War Dept announced approval of $33 million Fuse and Detonator plant near Jacksonville, Arkansas

In June, 76 years ago, the War Department approved construction of a $33 million fuse and detonator plant near Jacksonville. This was six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and thus before U.S. entry into the war. The plant was named the Arkansas Ordnance Plant (AOP) and it was fully operational just one year after the announced construction. The plant left both a literal and figurative mark on the Jacksonville community, as well as the Little Rock region as a whole. It boosted Jacksonville’s population at the time from 400 to 42,000. It also provided much-needed income to the largely rural, agricultural-based, and economically-disadvantaged region still suffering from the Great Depression. It brought women to the public workforce – called WOWs, short for Women Ordnance Workers – who made up roughly seventy-five percent of the facility’s labor force. And it gave African American employees a sense of economic freedom and equality despite being near the bottom of the state’s economic and social totem pole due to Jim Crow segregation. It was also bustling; by war’s end, employees had produced over a billion detonators and nearly two hundred million fuses, accounting for over eighty-eight percent of all the detonators and fuses used by the Allies during World War II. The plant began dismissing employees when war wound down in late-1945, and within six months of V-J Day it closed completely. In short, however, the economic successes brought by the Arkansas Ordnance Plant eventually paved the way for Little Rock AFB.