Rock Island Arsenal: Prison, Forge, and Arsenal of Democracy

The island sitting in the Mississippi River between Davenport and Rock Island has been many things: a Native American homeland, a Civil War prison camp, and one of the most productive weapons factories in American history.

The Sauk people knew this ground well. Their largest settlement in North America, the village of Saukenuk, stood at the head of this island, home to an estimated five thousand people before American military pressure forced their removal in the eighteen thirties. That displacement is the unspoken prologue to everything that followed.

The federal government established an arsenal on the island in eighteen sixteen, though serious manufacturing operations did not begin until after the Civil War. What preceded the factories was the prison.

In December of eighteen sixty-three, the first Confederate prisoners arrived on Rock Island, transported north after the battles at Lookout Mountain. Within weeks there were nearly five thousand six hundred men confined on the island. The camp would eventually hold more than twelve thousand prisoners over its twenty-month operation. The conditions were grim. The barracks were unfinished when the prisoners arrived. Disease spread rapidly through the overcrowded enclosures. During the first four months alone, more than nine hundred fifty Confederate soldiers died. Before the camp closed, nearly two thousand men had perished, most from smallpox and pneumonia. Critics called it the Andersonville of the North.

After the war, the island was transformed into one of the nation's premier military manufacturing facilities. The arsenal produced artillery during the Spanish-American War, expanded massively during World War One, and during World War Two operated around the clock, seven days a week. Workers here built more than eighty-five thousand Browning machine guns and cut one hundred ninety-three million metallic links for disintegrating ammunition belts.

Today Rock Island Arsenal remains an active military installation and the largest government-owned weapons manufacturing arsenal in the United States. The Confederate cemetery on the island still holds the graves of those prison-camp dead, row after row of white markers in the river shadow. The Rock Island Arsenal Museum traces the whole arc from those first barracks to the present.

The island has been a place of confinement and production, of suffering and industrial power , sometimes in the same decade.