A new life for the Badger

When I first saw Devils Lake and the Baraboo area, I was 15 and had no idea that any place so beautiful lay so close to my home in northern Illinois. When some of us could drive, I dragged my high school friends there and we scrambled up and down the rocky bluffs like goats on a holiday. It remains one of my favorite places in the world.

Sometime, on one of those trips, I first saw the Badger Army Ammunition Plant. It was a sprawling complex of buildings, unmistakably military in their utilitarian design but otherwise uninteresting. It was a place where the army made ammunition, obviously. They had to do it somewhere. I never gave it half a minute’s thought.

It wasn’t until about 10 years ago, long after I’d moved to Wisconsin, that I heard anything specific about the place. It came to the notice of the statewide news media that the plant was going to be demolished. Most of the buildings were made of wood and the army wanted to simply burn them down. Some local people thought that sounded like a bad idea, given that the wood had been marinated in the fumes and dust of whatever sinister substances had been made there. A successful campaign forced the army to tear down and safely dispose of the wood and other materials.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, Alison Duff, a young woman representing the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance, came to speak at the Autumn Assembly of the John Muir (Wisconsin) Chapter of the Sierra Club. The Badger plant, it seemed, was not simply going to be torn down and the land sold off to condo and mcmansion developers or turned into a giant corporate dairy farm. The land was going to be dedicated to environmentally friendly uses, uses that had been decided by a consensus of stakeholders in the community. And the property was much more than the group of buildings visible from Route 12; it sprawls over 7,354 acres of varied terrain. Suddenly I was thinking about this place.

After the talk I approached Alison about the possibility of a tour of the property to see what was being done and what was planned for the future. Eager to publicize the project, she was very encouraging and gave me contact information. I did some sketchy Internet research on the plant’s history and the more I read, the bigger the story seemed to get.

On the appointed day, Alison emerged from the administration building, greeted me and we left in her Jeep, driving through a strange country of ghostly dilapidated buildings, rusting metal and weeds. The land on which the Badger plant lies is at the intersection of three distinct geologic features and biologic communities. On the south and west it is glacial outwash, thick deposits of sand and gravel laid down as the glaciers melted, it was covered in tallgrass prairie. To the east is the glacial moraine, marking one of the farthest advances of the Wisconsin glaciation. Its rolling hills were in oak savanna, prairie with burr and white oak trees spaced like trees in a park. To the north both the prairie and savanna melded into the hardwood forest of the ancient quartzite Baraboo Hills.

When white settlement began, it was the land of the Ho-Chunk people and had been since the mid-18th century. Before that the Sauk people lived there, accounting for the village names of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac and the geographical name Sauk Prairie for the whole outwash plain. White farmers arrived in the 1830s and displaced the Ho-Chunk. They farmed the outwash plain, and with its thick level soil, it became some of the most productive farmland in the state. They grazed the savannah and used the hardwood forest for woodlot. Their way of life persisted for more than 100 years until the storm clouds of World War II blew in over the horizon. In the ominous fall of 1941, the U.S. government chose the Sauk Prairie and some adjacent land as the site for a new ordnance plant to make the ammunition for a war that seemed inevitable.

Why there, in the peaceful middle of Wisconsin? The army was looking for land away from the coasts, between the Appalachians and the Rockies specifically, with a good supply of water and access to transportation. It needed to be far enough from a metro area that a catastrophic explosion would have minimal effect, yet near potential sources of labor. It needed a solid soil base without blowing sand that could degrade machinery and contaminate product. The Sauk Prairie met all criteria.

Eighty farm families were displaced from the 10,000+ acres originally taken. They were paid the appraised value of their farms, but appraisals were low then, and how could any money replace a homestead that had been in a family for decades? Some families tried to resist legally, but history flowed against them; the nation was behind the war effort.

The effort became urgent after Pearl Harbor and construction began in March of 1942. Up to 12,000 construction workers were on the project and essentially it all went up at once. Despite its scale – when finished it was the largest plant of its kind in the world – it was in production by the following winter. Eventually it included more than 1,400 buildings, 130 miles of roads, 26 miles of railroad and 200 miles of elevated steam pipe. At the peak of production, 6,800 employees worked in round-the-clock shifts.

It seems incredible that the nation could have so quickly launched such a titanic effort to meet the requirements of war. It’s hard to imagine the United States of today mobilizing on that scale.

The Badger Ordnance Works, as it was first known, produced propellant, the stuff that drives bullets and shells out of guns and rockets through the air. Following the frenetic efforts of World War II, the plant lapsed into dormancy, until Korea roused it briefly. It slept again until Vietnam brought its longest period of activity, 1966-1975. After that production ceased for good, but nearly half a billion pounds of propellant had been shipped off to fill the bullets, shells and rockets. The plant was maintained by a skeleton crew, ready for another war, until 1997 when the army officially declared it excess and the Olin Corporation, which had been managing it since Korea, began the clean up.

This is where the focus of the story changes from history to environment. Throughout its operating history the plant, though relatively safe for the workers, had been contaminating the soil and water around and under it with an assortment of nasty chemicals, metals and explosive wastes. When the army declared it no longer needed the plant, local citizens pressed county leaders to begin a discussion about the future of the property. By 2000 the Badger Army Ammunition Plant Reuse Committee began to meet in an attempt to find a community consensus as to what should be done with the property. The committee delivered its report in 2001 and the plans for the property took shape.

Incredibly, the consensus decision was to manage the property as a unit, though it would have multiple owners: the state of Wisconsin, which would use its portion in conjunction with adjacent Devils Lake State Park; the Ho-Chunk Nation would get part for raising bison and other uses; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would have land to continue its dairy forage research. Mostly on the outwash plain, the Ho-Chunk’s area would be restored to tallgrass prairie. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources section, which connects Devils Lake to the Wisconsin River, would be mostly managed as savannah on the moraine and forest where it reached into the Baraboo Hills and the USDA, in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin would use its part to experiment with using dairy forage to find ways to make dairy farming environmentally sustainable.

As Alison drove around the property, she pointed out the various places where earlier efforts by the army and more recent efforts by the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance had succeeded, at least partially, in restoring some of the prairie and savannah habitat. It’s a daunting job. The property is vast (about 11 ½ square miles) and funds are scarce. Not only are there the problems of the remaining structures, but also undeveloped land has been infested with invasive non-native plants such as honeysuckle, autumn olive and buckthorn. Thickets of these shrubs suppress the fires needed to reclaim and maintain the prairie, so the shrubs must be cleared away before effective burns can take place.

On the far eastern edge of the property, Alison showed me one of the more visible remnants of the original farms, a barn foundation standing alone on a knoll. It spoke like poetry of life past and time gone. Now the use for which this farm had been torn down was passing as it had replaced the Indian villages before it.

Our route climbed into the Baraboo Hills and we stopped near some water storage pools where a weathered wooden platform allowed us to look out over the plain, with its hundreds of abandoned buildings, across the Wisconsin River all the way to Blue Mound, west of Madison. Behind us was the fence marking the border with Devils Lake park. The magnitude of the potential of this place and the work remaining began to sink in.

Down on the plain we stopped at one of the pre-plant cemeteries, which the army had scrupulously maintained. Near it was the landfill where the materials of the contaminated buildings will be placed, sealed off with clay from the ground water. As we drove back into the production area, I saw the demolition in progress. Workers in masks and protective suits pecked away at the old buildings, many of which were covered in asbestos. It seemed a tiny effort compared to what was left to do and especially compared to the effort used to build the place. This area was to be part of the Ho-Chunk’s buffalo prairie; it took real vision to imagine it as that.

Alison introduced me to Verlyn Mueller, archivist of the Badger History Group, which is collecting what it can on the plant history and its predecessors on the labnd. He worked for 26 years doing instrument maintenance at the plant and he’d seen many changes.

Though it did dangerous work, the plant had a remarkable safety record; the worst single accident was during World War II when a nitroglycerin explosion killed four men. The buildings in which explosives were produced were built to contain possible explosions. Those where they were stored were isolated.

Alison told me many of those buildings might still be standing when the land was transferred to the Wisconsin DNR. They were not contaminated so the army was not obligated to demolish them. How could all these scattered buildings be compatible with what was to be a natural area? How could a funds-starved DNR find the money to tear them down? She saw conflicts too between ecological restoration and historical preservation. Should they tear out remnants like the barn foundation I’d seen? Or cut down the old fruit and other non-native trees? Some of them were a century old or more and huge. So much remains to be decided and done, but she has real optimism about the project.

“It’s an opportunity,” she said, “which we wouldn’t have had if the plant had never been here.” So as much damage as the plant had done to the land, the land existed as an intact unit and could serve as a laboratory and example for others trying to restore such places. “The lessons that we learn here should be applicable elsewhere,” she said.

Driving home I thought about the vastness of this story, how it had changed the course of a community forever. It stretched back through time to the prehistoric and out through space to the far ends of the Earth where the global war and its aftershocks had reached. And so all history is, really, complex almost beyond our grasp, all the interactions between people near and far, between people and the land they live on.

I’d like to believe the story of the Badger plant could be a signal to us all; though we’ve damaged our world badly, by working together somehow, despite all the odds, we can manage to make it whole again. It’s a long shot, but what else have we got?