Badger Ordnance Works: Powder, Prairie, and the Ho-Chunk
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
On the Sauk Prairie between Baraboo and the Wisconsin River once stood one of the largest munitions plants in the country. During the Second World War the Army needed smokeless powder in vast quantities, and on the twenty-ninth of October, nineteen forty-one, the government announced that a huge powder works would rise here. Weeks later President Franklin Roosevelt authorized sixty-five million dollars for its construction, and despite the anguished protests of the farm families who lived on this rich prairie, the bulldozers came in the spring of nineteen forty-two.
Dozens of farms were seized and erased. Built and operated by the Hercules Powder Company, the Badger Ordnance Works produced nitrocellulose propellant for the guns of three wars, the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. This ground carries a far older story too.
It lies in the heart of the ancestral territory of the Ho-Chunk people, who tended these prairies with fire for countless generations before being pushed out in the eighteen forties. Today the factory has been dismantled, and the land is being reborn. The Ho-Chunk Nation has long sought the return of about fifteen hundred acres, and conservationists are working to restore the tallgrass prairie that once covered it all.
