Sandston, Virginia: A Town Built for Women War Workers
Near Richmond, Virginia
The neighborhood you are passing through began as a wartime emergency. In the summer of nineteen eighteen, DuPont signed a contract with the federal government to run the Seven Pines munitions plant east of Richmond, and thousands of women arrived to sew silk powder bags for large-caliber naval guns. To house them, the United States Housing Corporation rushed up roughly two hundred thirty prefabricated kit bungalows, sourced from the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, and shipped in by rail.
The plant fell silent on Armistice Day, and by nineteen twenty-one the government had sold the whole village to the Richmond-Fairfield Railway Company. The new owners renamed the community Sandston, in honor of RFRC president Oliver J. Sands, and repackaged it as a commuter suburb.
The kit houses are still here, quietly lining streets that were once a government munitions colony. Richmond International Airport, which grew up nearby, was dedicated in nineteen twenty-seven when Charles Lindbergh attended the ceremony in honor of fellow aviator Richard Byrd.
