Hawthorne: The World's Largest Ammo Depot

The little Nevada town of Hawthorne came into being in eighteen eighty-one as a railroad division point for the Carson and Colorado line. But what put it on the map permanently was a disaster that happened three thousand miles away.

In nineteen twenty-six, an explosion at Lake Denmark, New Jersey, destroyed a Navy munitions depot and killed over twenty people. The Navy concluded that ammunition should never again be stored near a major population center. They needed somewhere remote, with flat terrain and dry weather. Hawthorne fit perfectly.

Construction of the Naval Ammunition Depot began in nineteen twenty-eight. During World War Two it expanded enormously, supplying ammunition for the Pacific fleet. Today, renamed the Hawthorne Army Depot, it sprawls across nearly one hundred fifty thousand acres and remains the largest conventional ammunition storage facility in the world. Those low concrete bunkers you see dotting the hills in every direction are called igloos, and there are more than two thousand of them out there.