The Pontiac (Ill.) Daily Leader reports that a statue was dedicated earlier this month commemorating the 52 people who died in an explosion in 1942 at an ordnance plant just off Route 66 in Elwood.
The statue, of a man in work clothes, wearing a hard hat and carrying a lunchbox, is next to the entrance to Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, in Elwood, about 50 miles south of Chicago, on land that was once part of what was also referred to as the Joliet Arsenal. […]
The early morning blast shattered windows miles away. The cause of the explosion remains unknown.
Developed to make ammunition for World War II, the arsenal was once the largest producer of TNT in the world. Route 66 and a railroad allowed for shipping the ammunition. The land it occupied is now a tall-grass prairie and the national cemetery. […]
The building that exploded was on a shell loading line where “the shells are packed for shipment to the fighting forces,” a newspaper account explained.One man, who was working in a building a quarter mile away, was quoted as saying that there were two blasts. “Each knocked him down and knocked him unconscious,” the story noted. The second explosion “was so deafening, you couldn’t grasp the magnitude of it.”
The United Press reported that the explosion “was so powerful that it rocked the earth in a 50-mile radius, like a quake.”
Regrettably, little information about the disaster is found on the Web. Guy Randall’s site has a photo of another statue at the cemetery pertaining to the disaster that was dedicated in 2001. The Lope also has a recent post about the cemetery itself.