Nitro: A City Built in Eleven Months

When the United States entered the First World War, it needed gunpowder, and it needed a place to make it. Engineers chose a spot along the Kanawha River in West Virginia, and what happened next was one of the fastest cities ever built.

In December of nineteen seventeen, Hercules Powder broke ground on Explosives Plant C, a facility designed to produce seven hundred thousand pounds of smokeless gunpowder per day. Within eleven months, a hundred and ten thousand workers had erected not just the plant and its nitric and sulfuric acid facilities, but an entire town, a civic center, a hospital, executive housing, and worker dormitories. The Army Ordnance Department named the place Nitro after nitrocellulose, the chemical compound at the heart of the powder.

The war ended in November of nineteen eighteen, a year after groundbreaking. The powder plant shut down almost immediately, but the workers stayed. Nitro incorporated as a city in nineteen thirty-two and has been home to the chemical industry on the Kanawha ever since.