Joliet Army Ammunition Plant

The facility briefly revived an automated load-assemble-pack (LAP) artillery shell operation that was managed by the Honeywell Corporation during the Reagan administration in the 1980s before it was finally closed.

The federal government acquired some of the land in Jackson Township to build the Joliet Arsenal through eminent domain.

Initially there was some resistance from local farmers relating to prices and moving problems, but 90% of the land was paid for through negotiated settlements.

[3] The United States had very little capacity for manufacturing military munitions in 1939 when World War II broke out.

In September 1940, Stone and Webster Engineering of New York was awarded the contract to construct the Kankakee Ordnance Works.

TNT production at the Kankakee works occurred until August 1945 with a peak output of 5.5 million short tons (5.0×10^6 t) per week.

Following the war the site was not completely inactive, DuPont leased space to manufacture ammonium nitrate for fertilizer.

Elwood loaded more than 926 million bombs, shells, mines, detonators, fuzes, and boosters, and Kankakee produced over 1 billion pounds (450,000 t) of TNT.

[4] Though both plants were designed with safety as a primary concern,[3] at 2:45 a.m. on June 5, 1942, a large explosion on the assembly line at the Elwood facility resulted in 48 dead or missing and was felt as far as Waukegan, Illinois, over 60 miles (97 km) north.

Another 41 were injured, five of them critically, from the explosion that leveled a building.... Not one of the 68 men inside the shipping unit when the blast occurred escaped death or injury."

The residents of surrounding small towns could hear the controlled explosions being used in the disposal activity from 2–3 miles away.

In early 2008, site cleanup was finished three years ahead of schedule, while groundwater monitoring remains ongoing.