Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 10, 1993 TAG: 9305100137
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO NOTE: BELOW
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GLEN WILTON LENGTH: Long
When the powder plant blew half a century ago, the blast echoed far beyond this mountain village.
Five miles away in Clifton Forge, police Officer Bob Craft saw the sky light up for a moment. Five seconds later, he heard a rumble. Then a roar.
Nine miles to the east in Longdale, the noise of the explosion was loud enough to awaken Aaron Nicely and his wife, Clifton Forge's Daily Review reported. "And from Lexington came word that the flash had been seen there."
In Glen Wilton, the effects were felt harder: Two workers died and four others were rushed to the hospital.
3:40 a.m., July 20, 1942: It was a moment that changed Glen Wilton - a calamity that halted its transformation from quiet village to industrial town.
Glen Wilton sits above the James River in northern Botetourt County. It's an old place. Antonia Wood McCoy, a Glen Wilton native who enjoys digging around in its history, says her kin bought farmland here in 1802.
For her family and others in Glen Wilton, the pace of life has followed the booms and busts of the town's industrial fortunes.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, iron-ore mines and furnaces offered jobs to local people and to outsiders hungry for work. McCoy's father worked for a while in the lab at the mines. Her husband's grandfather was an engineer on the "dinky" - the small-gauge railroad that hauled ore out of the mountains to the furnaces.
The iron industry played itself out by the 1920s, and life in Glen Wilton slowed.
But that changed in 1941.
"All of a sudden we had a powder plant," says McCoy's husband, Raymond, also a Glen Wilton native. "Man, the town was bustling again."
Triton Chemical wanted to build a TNT factory. The company, which already had a plant in New Jersey, was under contract to provide explosives to the U.S. Army and Navy. It promised to bring jobs - lots of them - to Botetourt County.
The county School Board agreed to turn over Glen Wilton's community school so it could be used as the company's administrative offices.
The deal was struck in secret. Triton paid $5 for the school.
When town residents learned their school had been closed and sold for next to nothing, they were angry. The school served 70 children from first grade through early high school.
Raymond McCoy says many residents believed county officials in Fincastle hardly knew or cared that Glen Wilton existed - a feeling that he says persists today.
Children arriving at school on a Tuesday morning found buses waiting to take them to schools in Eagle Rock and Fincastle. Their parents refused to let them get on board. For several days, the drivers left town with empty buses.
Antonia Wood's parents would not let her older sister, Martha Sue, ride over the narrow roads that crossed Prices Bluff on the way to Eagle Rock. So their mother taught Martha Sue at home.
Antonia, not yet old enough to go to school, listened and learned. By the time she was school age, she was far enough ahead to start in second grade.
To get their school back, Glen Wilton residents sued.
Triton had promised the School Board that it would employ at least 400 people. But by September 1941, the Roanoke Times reported, Triton had hired just 200 workers and its lawyers frankly admitted the company had failed to keep its word.
Triton finally agreed to put up $6,000 toward construction of a new school.
In the meantime, the company had poured more than $1.5 million into putting up factory buildings dotting 1,831 acres of forest.
"Peaceful Village To Boom With War," one newspaper headline said.
The town expanded to include two general stores, a restaurant and a movie theater.
"Shiny automobiles rumble through the sod streets and kick up dust that never seems to quiet before other machines appear," a Roanoke Times story said. Men came on foot and in cars looking for jobs.
"Coming out of the Depression era, people were thankful for jobs - especially close to home," Antonia Wood McCoy says.
The factory was down in a natural cup surrounded by mountains. Trees were left on the plant site to serve as camouflage and to blunt the force of any explosion. Some houses were moved down the hill, board by board, to keep them out of danger.
The plant was dedicated in June 1941. Triton's president promised the company was going to be the world's largest producer of TNT.
By July 1941, the plant reported it was running on three shifts a day and making 50 tons of TNT a week.
Houston L. Thurston, who lived in a farmhouse nearby, took a job as a guard.
Thurston, now 81, remembers that plant security was headed by an "FBI man." Thurston says the federal agent tested the security around the plant by creeping up on the guards.
"He caught some of them coon-hunting. Some of them was asleep." Thurston didn't sleep on the job, however. "He never did sneak up on me without me spotting him."
Ground zero
War came. TNT was needed more than ever. In early 1942, the federal government used special wartime powers to take over the factory.
It turned its operation over to Hercules Powder, which already was running Radford's munitions factory.
Federal officials vowed to make it a safer place to work.
Soon after, a worker died after being burned by acid.
A week later, the plant was ripped by the explosion.
The Daily Review said the "wash house" building - ground zero of the blast - was blown to bits. Steel girders twisted and cracked. Concrete foundations to other buildings were "uprooted as if they had been weeds pulled out of the garden."
The roof of the pack house - where large amounts of TNT were stored - was showered with hot splinters of metal. But it did not explode. The Daily Review said that "had the pack house gone up . . . there might have been little left of the plant or the town of Glen Wilton."
News accounts identified the men who died as W.M. Hill, 30, and Lawrence Hipes, 40.
Others barely escaped serious injury. Frank Hambrick was thrown 20 to 30 feet in the air, the Daily Review said. Another worker was blown down an escape chute.
Antonia Wood McCoy was 5 at the time. She remembers her father, a security guard, waking up at the sound of the explosion. "I've got to go," he said. "I have to go up there."
Her father had finished his shift and come home a short time before. "We've said so many times how thankful we were that he was home," she says.
Nearer to the plant, Houston Thurston was awakened by shattering glass. His upstairs windows had been blown out.
Thurston says most of the blast was directed toward the mountains behind the plant.
"All of the pressure didn't come this way," Thurston said, sitting in front of the house where he still lives 50 years later. Had the blast come toward the village, "it would have been a whole lot worse that it was."
He reported to work. The chief guard sent Thurston down to Lick Run to seal off the road into the area. "He told me to stop everybody coming in here, except for people who lived here, or police or FBI men."
Everybody a suspect
Plant officials were close-mouthed about what had happened, except to say the explosion had been an accident.
Some people called it sabotage. The Germans, they said.
"Everybody suspected everybody - with the propaganda the way it was during World War II," Raymond McCoy says.
McCoy says even "the poor old hobos who got off the train" found themselves under suspicion. "The hobos finally learned to give Glen Wilton a wide berth."
After the blast, Hercules and the government abandoned the plant.
Glen Wilton's economic boom was over.
The town's children got their old school back, scaled down to grades one through four. For field trips, their teachers took them for walks around the TNT factory. "It was always a big thrill," Raymond McCoy says.
An elderly gentleman, Arch Crush, served as the sole security officer for the now-silent powder plant. Raymond McCoy and other village boys loved to go on patrol with Mr. Crush. "This old fellow was a joy to talk to," McCoy says. "He had a lot of memories."
The boys bought metal hoops, gathered wood for backboards and put up basketball goals at the ends of a concrete slab that had been a foundation for one of the factory buildings. "That was a big thing on the weekends," McCoy says. "That was our sandlot, so to speak."
After World War II, the land was turned over to George Washington National Forest. Eventually, all the surviving buildings were razed.
In 1981, George Holley was doing an archaeological survey for the national forest when he ran across the rubble of the factory. He recorded dozens of concrete structures - aging vats, pillars and slabs - still standing like mini-Stonehenges among the redbuds and Virginia Creeper.
As he worked, Holley ran into an old hunter.
The hunter told Holley: "There's rock here that burns."
The old man picked a slab of goldish-brown "rock" off the ground, struck a match and lit it. The flame gave off a stinking black smoke.
Holley had run across a cache of TNT residue. The Forest Service contacted the Army. Munitions experts came to the old plant and detonated the flammable rock.
I treasure the town' After 31 years at the paper mill in Covington, Houston Thurston is retired. He tends to chickens and grandchildren. "If I live to see June 5, I'll be 82," he says.
Glen Wilton's last general store closed a few years ago. Its movie theater and restaurant are long gone. Raymond and Antonia McCoy estimate that 35 houses that were standing when they were kids have disappeared, some rotted away, some burned, some torn down.
The town still has a post office and three churches - Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist - that date to the turn of the century or earlier.
The town is home to perhaps 200 people. Some farm or raise cattle. Others, like the McCoys, commute to Covington or Clifton Forge for work.
How different would Glen Wilton be today if the powder plant had stayed? Antonia McCoy believes it would be bigger and busier, but its growth probably would have been limited by the lack of open land in Glen Wilton's valley.
She says the town is a good place to raise kids - although teen-agers are less satisfied with sandlot ball and more likely to complain that there's nothing to do. One daughter and son-in-law are raising three boys in town, and restoring a Victorian house that has been in the family since the 1890s.
"As I get older, I find I treasure the town much more," McCoy says.
To this day, she says, "some people in Botetourt County have never even heard of Glen Wilton - which is probably OK."
The old school building now houses the volunteer fire department, and Glen Wilton's children ride buses to schools in other parts of the county. But on sunny afternoons, they can pedal their bicycles over the village's curving streets without fear of shiny automobiles or TNT trucks.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB