Weldon Spring Heights, Missouri: TNT Capital of the Midwest

The land around this small St. Charles County village carried one of the most extraordinary wartime secrets in the Midwest. On Thanksgiving Day, nineteen forty, the Army broke ground on a seventeen-thousand-acre ordnance works here, displacing three entire towns, Hamburg, Howell, and Toonerville, whose homes, churches, and schools were demolished or burned.

At its peak in nineteen forty-three, the plant employed five thousand two hundred people, running more than one thousand buildings capable of producing over one million pounds of TNT per day. By the time production stopped on V-J Day, August fifteenth, nineteen forty-five, the Weldon Spring plant had manufactured over seven hundred ten million pounds of TNT and thirty-three million pounds of DNT for the Allied war effort. The story did not end there.

In nineteen fifty-seven the Atomic Energy Commission took over two hundred acres of the site to process uranium ore. Decades of contamination followed, and the cleanup left a forty-five-foot mound of radioactive and chemical waste that today stands as a public interpretive site, a grassy hill visitors can climb to read about what lies beneath.