In January 1942, a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, low-flying airplanes began appearing in the skies between Springfield and Decatur. Soon, farmers in the area were told they’d have 30 days to leave their land and urged to take as much personal property as they could in that time.
They objected, saying their land was among the top 5% in the country for production of corn, wheat and soybeans.
“We were told to raise food to win this war,” farmer Harry E. Pickrell told the Chicago Tribune at the time. “Then this thing comes up.”
“This thing” was a giant ordnance plant — nearly 20,000 acres stretching almost 4 miles along U.S. 36 in western Sangamon County, about 60 miles west of Champaign-Urbana. The plant was to be built on land that was flat, far away from coastlines, close to the Wabash Railroad and Illinois Terminal interurban lines, and reasonably near a motherlode of prospective workers in Springfield (population 75,500) and Decatur (60,000).
Remnants of the armament plant are still visible today, some 80 years later, a few hundred yards north of Interstate 72 near Illiopolis, where in the distance motorists can see a water tower, a number of slowly decaying buildings and “igloos,” half-buried structures where explosives at the plant were stored.
Less than a year after a federal court approved an application from the War Department to take the land from farmers by eminent domain, a virtual city had been built…
