Naval Ammunition Depot

One room of the depot survives in print. The December 22, 1944 issue of The Powder Keg, the depot's own paper, now in the Nebraska History Museum's collections, described the Wad Room, where cardboard was cut down for use in ammunition shells. Barbara Parker, twenty-four, led the crew, among them Fern Schumann, Laura Demmer, Bessie Woods of Hastings and Wilma Simmons, with machinists Don Hunt and Ralph Zeigler. They turned out 15,000 to 20,000 wad spacers a day. The same issue profiled Dr. W. R. Peck, back from twenty months overseas with the Third Marine Division.

What the plaque says

Naval Ammunition Depot The U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot, known local- ly as "the NAD," was the largest of the navy's World War II inland munitions depots, occupy- ing almost 49,000 acres of Adams and Clay County farmland. Construction began in July 1942; loading, assembly, and storage of ordnance continued until final closing in June 1966. By V-J Day in 1945, the NAD employed 10,000 military and civilian workers. At one point during the war the NAD was producing nearly forty percent of the navy's ordnance, including six- teen-inch shells. Costing $71 million, the NAD had 207 miles of railroad track, 274 miles of roads, and 2,200 buildings, including hundreds of igloo-shaped explosives storage magazines. The depot embit- tered farmers whose land was taken by the gov- ernment, but it produced an economic boom as Hastings's population jumped from 15,200 in 1942 to 23,000 in 1943. A September 1944 ex- plosion killed nine workers, injured fifty-three, and left a 550-foot-long crater. The blast was felt 100 miles away and shattered windows for miles around. Adams County Historical Society Clay County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer — 21 mi
  Edward Durell Stone's island pavilion in Grand Island and an 1890s railroad town of moved buildings, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905.

More markers nearby

• Hastings College Campus Historic District — 2.6 mi
• McCormick Hall — 2.6 mi
• Heartwell Park Historic District — 2.9 mi
• Central Hastings Historic District — 3.5 mi