Landmarks: Monument to Will County’s civilian casualties of World War II heading home to site of 1942 explosion

A crowd will gather Saturday at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Will County around a bronze statue depicting a 1940s workman wearing a hard hat and carrying a lunchbox.

Plainly dressed, the grim faced figure could represent workers from just about any point over the last century. But it was made to give lasting substance to 48 men who were vaporized in an explosion 80 years ago, when the site was an ammunition plant supplying Allied efforts in World War II.

When the statue and concrete pedestal bearing the names of the civilian workers who lost their lives in the line of duty are welcomed to a new home this week, it also will mark the convergence of several interrelated storylines.

“There are all kinds of nuances to this story that make it really remarkable,” said Joe Wheeler, Midewin’s archaeologist and heritage program manager.

The main one, of course, involves that tragic night eight decades ago, when the workers lost their lives as anti-tank mines were being loaded aboard a boxcar at what was then known as the Elwood Ordnance Plant.

Wheeler said about 2 a.m. June 5, 1942, the plant was operating at peak capacity.

“This was at the exact same time as the Battle of Midway in the Pacific, so it was a high stress time,” he said.

Even on the night shift, there were dozens of workers near the loading operation.

“Just after their lunch break, there were two successive explosions, and that killed 48 of the 78 arsenal workers there in an instant,” Wheeler said.

It’s an event Midewin Heritage Association President Carol Ference, of Homewood, can relate to. As a 5-year-old child growing up in Hammond, Indiana, she experienced the fringe effects of a major explosion at the Standard Oil refinery in nearby Whiting that killed two people.

“I was in bed,” she said. “I felt it, could see the smoke from our back porch. My mom said she could see the flames. I don’t remember a whole lot, but it leaves an impression.”

The Will County blast may have been even more memorable. Contemporary reports indicate it broke windows in Kankakee and was felt as far away as Waukegan.

Identification of those who were killed was a haphazard process, as there was little to work with. One man was identified by a ring on the partial remains of a hand. Others were presumed dead simply because they never returned home or to work.

“It took them a while to sort it out,” Wheeler said. “Ultimately, 48 death certificates were issued by the Will County coroner.”

But it was wartime, and there was work to do, said Wheeler, and uninjured workers in other areas of the plant were back on the job an hour after the explosion. Buildings were positioned well apart from each other to guard against an even worse catastrophe.

Among the uninjured workers was a young man named Elmo Younger, who had hopped on a bus from the South around 1940 in pursuit of better prospects. A few months after the Elwood explosion, Younger was drafted into the Army, survived the war and came home a sergeant.

“He was active in the community for 50 years, a real civic activist,” Wheeler said.

Meanwhile, ammunition production was consolidated into what became the Joliet Arsenal in 1945, though munitions were produced only during the Korean and Vietnam wars. By 1993, the arsenal was declared officially inactive.

That’s when Younger’s civic interests came full circle. He was appointed to a commission that would help determine the fate of the arsenal property, and in 1996, 20,000 acres of the plant was turned into Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Other portions became the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery and an industrial park.

Like the Whiting blast did with Ference, the 1942 explosion had left a large impression on Younger, and he began planning and fundraising in 2000 for a marker to indicate that something significant had happened on that land, that people had lost their lives here in the effort to win an overseas war. A couple of years later, a bronze statue depicting an arsenal worker arrived from where it had been cast in England.

The workers who had been killed were civilians, so the statue and base etched with the names of the 48 workers killed in the explosion as well as five others involved in fatal accidents on the property during World War II, wasn’t allowed in the National Cemetery. Eventually, the owners of the adjacent industrial park donated a small parcel for the statue, and it was installed near the cemetery, but not on cemetery property.

“It lasted about two years before the statue got stolen,” Wheeler said. “That much bronze, for scrappers, was pretty attractive.

“So Elmo went about another fundraising effort, leading a committee of former arsenal workers.”

The theft was disheartening, but it provided an opportunity to correct part of the statue that had irked some of the former workers.

“They got the guy with the hard hat OK, but he was holding a square lunchbox, like a kid would use,” Wheeler said. A worker’s lunchbox was a more serious affair with a dome top that accommodated a thermos for drinks or soup.

Younger and his committee raised another $30,000 plus shipping from England for a new statue with a proper worker’s lunchbox, which was remounted with relief upon the empty pedestal.

A few years after that, the original statue turned up on a farm in Braceville, a tiny town in Grundy County. But it had already been replaced by a better model, so the arsenal workers committee donated the recovered statue to the village of Elwood, which placed it in a park.

As the years went by, work to restore Midewin into a prairie ecosystem continued, while its armory past faded further into the past. A service road that once funneled traffic past the new statue was rerouted, and all of a sudden it was “off in the distance and easy to miss,” Ference said.

“It was in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “There was no interpretation, just a statue sitting there. If you wanted to find out what it was, you had to stop your car and get out and walk.”

Ference’s predecessor as president of the Midewin Heritage Association, Lorin Schab, met with Younger and Midewin Director Wade Spang at a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the explosion, where Midewin’s leadership was “convinced and cajoled” to move the statue to the preserve near where the ordnance plant had been, Wheeler said.

Making that happen has taken five years.

“Part of that was to get an appropriate place set up, and that took unprogrammed funds,” Wheeler said. “There were a lot of small steps associated with it, and a lot of it had to happen with not very much funding.”

In the meantime Schab, a former mayor of Orland Hills who was a Midewin expert and enthusiast who used to lead frequent tours of the former ammunition plant area, died in 2019. And Spang retired and moved away.

“But the promise stuck,” Wheeler said, and when the statue and base are rededicated Saturday, they will be accompanied by interpretive signs imparting the information Schab used to give on his tours, as well as some benches donated by Schab’s family.

And Elmo Younger, who was there the night of the explosion 80 years earlier and who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, is set to be on hand for the ceremony as well. He’ll be joined by family and descendants of his co-workers who were killed that night.

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As other remnants of the property’s days as a munitions factory are gradually removed, Ference is glad the statue is finding a home in Midewin proper, and particularly that it will be placed near the “igloo” bunkers that are among the few traces remaining of that time.

“We’ve always felt that something should be left as a reminder that before there was Midewin, for 50 years, there was an arsenal,” she said. “Having the statue there and the signage explains what this is all about.”

It also serves as a reminder of a mindset from a different time.

“Everyone was dedicated to the war effort,” Ference said. “Everyone pitched in and did their part.

“They certainly were casualties of the war. It happened; we don’t want to glorify it, but we don’t want to minimize it either.”

The rededication ceremony will be at 10 a.m. June 4 at Midewin’s Iron Bridge Trailhead.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.