Ghost Towns Past & Future

By last week a familiar spectre of the U. S. countryside had thrown off his shroud, picked up his dinner pail, gone back to work. The ghost town was coming to life. Field representatives of the Defense Advisory Commission, notebooks in hand, scurried through cobwebby, long-idle factories in Ohio and Illinois, dying mining and industrial towns in western Pennsylvania. Engineer Morris Llewellyn Cooke, a lieutenant of Commissioner Sidney Hillman, released to manufacturers a report of facilities available to 15 ghost towns. He planned to farm out defense contracts (Britain's "bits & pieces" system) to these "shutdown areas," thereby spreading the work of subcontractors into its smallest possible subdivisions. Several moribund New England towns rolled up their sleeves and spit on their hands. But while the defense boom reclaimed old ghost towns, a new question rose: How many new ones would it create?

Across the Ohio River from Louisville, Charlestown, Ind. (pre-defense pop., 850) was bewildered and irritated last week. Du Pont engineers were building for the U. S. Government a vast, sprawling $50,000,000 smokeless-powder plant of 100 buildings (some reportedly underground for air-raid protection) on 6,000 acres of woodland. At first Charlestowners had been as elated as small boys by this windfall. But by last week their town had grown to 5.000. Where there had been three people to a house, there now were twelve. Rents doubled, trailer camps toad-stooled, a carpenter lives in a truck with an oil stove to keep him warm. Wrote one harassed inhabitant in the Louisville Courier-Journal: ". . . Although we were paid well for our acreage, still it isn't so easy to stand by and see the familiar old oak, the lilacs, hollyhocks and roses around the door trampled under foot to make way for the giant smokestacks that rose almost overnight."

Big, red-faced Town Marshal Joe Peyton found his one-man job a nightmare, couldn't unsnarl the daily traffic jam that tied up the public square. A 300% increase in mail had the post office stumped. Five crews of linemen scrambled and shinnied to make telephone connections. Rushing to finish a much-needed sewage system, WPAsters built street-corner privies which indignant citizens threatened to burn. Sidewalk hawkers with pushcarts turned Charlestown into a Lower East Side. Jam-packed was the town's lone grog shop.--Every night was Saturday night and Saturday night was chaos.

More acute than temporary inconveniences was the problem of permanent housing. The present weekly payroll is $4000,000, but Du Pont, in charge of the Government's operations, expects to expand the construction crew to over 10,000 within a month, and eventually maintain an operating personnel of a few thousand less. Charlestown realtors looked hungrily for a housing boom. But fortnight ago Indiana Defense Coordinator Henry B. Steeg announced that the Government's powder plant will not be converted to peacetime industry once the defense effort is over; it will be closed. So Government agencies shied from financing a housing project and Charlestowners had the choice of building a potential ghost town or letting nearby Louisville, Jeffersonville, New Albany make off with the swag.

What went on in Charlestown was likely to happen in many another U. S. community. Unlike most other materials of war, explosives should be produced in sparsely-settled areas, can seldom make use of the surplus labor and housing of large urban centres. With an estimated 20 new explosive plants on Government books (five or six already a-building), the U. S. hoped to prevent the dreaded boom town-ghost town cycle. One solution: a Government plan to build 1,000 $2,500 homes near Radford, Va. (site of a new $35,000,000 plant to be built by Hercules Powder Co.) on land leased from farmers. The homes would house workers as long as needed, then be sold to the farmers to provide better housing for their families.

* Du Pont workers might tipple in Charles-town's pub, but drinking within the company's property limits was taboo. Finding an empty whiskey powdered it, bottle, Du matched the Pont sleuths fingerprints on it with reportedly a set in the company files, discharged the guilty worker.

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