Museum revives story of Badger ammo plant
During WWII, facility was largest in world
NORTH FREEDOM - Verlyn Mueller opens a cabinet and pulls out a brightly colored crimson flag featuring a sun in the center.
Look closer, and you see that the large yellow orb isn’t a sun — it’s a hand grenade.
The flag flapped from a pole at the Badger Army Ammunition Plant at a time when thousands of workers at the Sauk County complex manufactured propellants destined for tens of millions of bombs, missiles, hand grenades and other ammunition during three wars.
“This is the Ordnance Corps flag. The Badger Army Ammunition Plant was under the Ordnance Corps until the Korean War,” said Mueller, curator and archivist of the small museum at the entrance of the site.
The Badger Army Ammunition Plant’s museum reopened this month with new exhibits and access ramps. The free museum was open for a few decades, but it closed three years ago when the U.S. Army completed the transfer of the land to several entities including the Ho-Chunk Nation, the state Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center.
The museum, housed in what’s known as Building 207, features photos, memorabilia, maps and artifacts collected since the plant originally called Badger Ordnance Works opened in 1942. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Army acquired 10,565 acres that housed dozens of farms and cottages, three schools, three churches and three cemeteries. Landowners received official notice in January 1942 to get off their property by March 1, and construction of hundreds of buildings started almost immediately.
On May 1, 1942, the factory’s first shipment of 60,000 pounds of smokeless powder left by train headed to an ordnance plant in Minnesota to be turned into M-1 rifle cartridges.
“Every bullet had its own recipe,” said Orie Eilertson, president of Badger History Group Inc., gazing at an exhibit case showing the insides of hand grenades and artillery shells.
During World War II, it was the largest munitions factory in the world.
For three wars — World War II, Korea and Vietnam — workers at the plant made smokeless powder, acid, sulfuric acid, rocket propellant and ball propellant used for small-arms cartridges.
The plant closed decades ago. Almost all of the buildings and structures used to manufacture propellants are now gone, and much of the property has been turned into the Sauk Prairie State Recreation Area, open to hikers, bird watchers, bicyclists and hunters.
A stop at the small museum at the entrance gives a nice overview of the property’s history as farmland, then a busy factory with thousands of workers, and now a quiet prairie.
Among the museum’s new exhibits pulled from the archives is a large wooden board filled with names of people who worked at the factory’s fire department. Among them: Elroy Hirsch, known as Crazylegs Hirsch when he was a star running back for the University of Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1940s. Hirsch served in the Marines during World War II, played for the Los Angeles Rams and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame before becoming UW athletic director from 1969 to 1987.
Other new exhibits at the museum feature information about housing for single employees and families, the Ho-Chunk Nation and the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center.
Mueller started working at Badger Army Ammunition in 1966, three weeks before a big explosion and fire ripped through a manufacturing line in the ball powder area, injuring 11 workers. Mueller started in process control instrumentation and spent three decades as an engineer at the plant.
Eilertson worked in the rocket propellant area for two summers while he was in high school in the late 1960s, blending batches of propellant, air-drying them to remove moisture and weighing them.
Now both Mueller and Eilertson volunteer their time at the museum to ensure the history of the plant is not forgotten.
“I would hope people learn something of the Badger Army Ammunition Plant when they visit the museum,” Mueller said. “We were built for World War II, and they started dismantling the plant at the end of the war, but it wasn’t too long before they realized its value, and then Korea started.”