Belle: Where North American Synthetic Ammonia Was Born

The small town of Belle, east of Charleston on the Kanawha River, has a claim that most chemical engineers know but almost no one else does: in the mid-nineteen twenties the DuPont plant here began producing high-pressure synthetic ammonia, among the earliest in North America. The site's roots go back to World War One. After the war, the Belle Alkali Company repurposed the unfinished plant for chlorine production, and DuPont took it over in the mid-nineteen twenties to demonstrate the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process.

At its peak in the early nineteen fifties, the plant employed thousands of people. Over the following decades it also produced Lucite acrylic plastic, nylon salt, Hypalon synthetic rubber, and Delrin resin. Belle became part of the Kanawha Valley's Chemical Valley corridor, a concentration of industrial chemistry that helped define twentieth-century American manufacturing.