January 4, 1936-Only Small Part of Muscle Shoals War Machinery Now in Use
THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS, SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1936
Only Small Part of Muscle Shoals War Machinery Now in Use
By ERNIE PYLE
FLORENCE, Ala.—Muscle Shoals, so prominent in the press for a decade, has come to be one of those abstract things, like “gold standard” and “theory of relativity,” which everybody knows about and few understand.
But Muscle Shoals is something real. You can see it, and walk around it, and even understand it without much trouble. Want to hear?
Originally, Muscle Shoals was merely the bunch of rocks out in the Tennessee River above Florence which formed a shoal.
Today Muscle Shoals is the name applied loosely to all the Government work going on around Florence. It consists of Wilson Dam and its powerhouse, the war-time munitions factory which now makes fertilizer for TVA, the fertilizer experimental laboratories, the clerical offices of TVA, three little Government villages and Florence itself.
Florence is an up-to-date city of about 11,000, with wide streets and lots of stores and homes. It is in the north of Alabama, only about 20 miles from Tennessee. It is abutted by two other little cities—Sheffield and Tuscumbia. The three of them together are known as the Tri-Cities, and they are very jealous of one another.
Florence, like Florida and prize fighters, has been up and down. The war-time munitions plant brought a big boom. The completion of Wilson Dam in 1925 brought a boom. Henry Ford’s plan to buy Muscle Shoals brought a boom.
But the bottoms fell out of the booms. Florence today is pretty well off, but it feels sad about not becoming another Birmingham.
A young fellow who lives here says he doesn’t like Florence. He says all that the people think about is getting money. They aren’t friendly, or interested in you, like the rest of the South, he says. Too many booms, he explains.
The Tennessee River flows alongside Florence, and Wilson Dam is just about three miles up the river. You can go to the edge of town and look up the river and see the dam.
The Government owns land at both ends of the dam—about 2,300 acres altogether. It is posted “Reservation,” like an Army camp. There are three Government-built villages along the river, where Government workers live. But most of them live in the Tri-Cities.
Wilson Dam was turned over to TVA by the War Department a couple of years ago. It is the only one of TVA’s dams that is finished and producing power.
It is a long dam (nine-tenths of a mile) and doesn’t look very high because it is so long, altho it is really more than 100 feet high.
At one end is a lock thru which boats can be passed up the river. A highway runs over the top of the dam. At the other end is the powerhouse. There are eight great turbines and generators in there and room for that many more.
Outside the powerhouse, the river bank is beautifully terraced and sodded. There is almost a solid block of transformers, in rows, with big wires running from them. Inside the powerhouse there are big empty rooms, the walls covered with dials and switches, and a man in the middle of the room sitting at a high desk, like a London bookkeeper.
Down the river two or three miles and inland half a mile (almost straight across the river from Florence) is the famous Nitrate Plant No. 2. This was the war-time munitions factory; it is now the place where TVA is making its phosphate fertilizer.
I had always pictured Nitrate Plant No. 2 as one big building, maybe looking something like a grain elevator, with three or four smokestacks sticking out of it. A joke on me.
Nitrate Plant No. 2 actually covers a couple of hundred acres, has at least 20 buildings, each one as big as an elevator or auto factory—and it has warehouses and office buildings and laboratory buildings, and railroad yards, and a high steel fence running around the whole thing.
TVA uses only a tiny part of this vast assemblage for its fertilizer manufacture—just three buildings down at one end.
All the rest stands idle; the munitions-making machinery still in there, just as it was left in 1919. TVA men keep it painted and greased, and all turning machinery is turned over now and then.
It gives you a creepy feeling to go thru these great lonesome buildings and see this weird-looking machinery, put there to kill people, lying there now like a sleeping cat, but ready on a minute’s notice to wake up and pour out the stuff to kill young men.
You feel especially creepy when you step into the live part of the great factory and see the contrast of this same machinery grinding out stuff to restore our wasted soil—to restore life, instead of extinguish it.
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This one was supposed to go out Friday, August 22. Somehow I missed it.
Fixed it!