By Pauline Masson –
“I don’t know if anybody realizes what a big part Pacific played in the war (WWII) effort,” the late Ed Brundick said in an oral history interview for the 1993 Pacific Pride Day celebration when he was 86 years old.
Mr. Brundick, retired at the time, had been an engineer with St. Louis Material and Supply Company that dredged gravel from the Meramec River. A thirty-year career there enabled him to send his three children to university, his son Edward Jr. became a doctor; his daughters Barbara Brundick Bruns and Margaret Brundick Koetting both became teachers. In his oral history interview, conducted by his daughter Barbara, he told a romantic story of the history of sand and gravel production in Pacific between 1922 and the 1960s. And then he touched on two regional building projects that used Pacific sand and gravel to take America into the Nuclear Age – Weldon Spring and Tyson Valley.
Sand and gravel are the basic building materials in concrete. And Pacific had a seemingly unending supply of both, as well as a railroad to deliver them in 1941 when the U.S. Army bought huge tracts of land in St. Charles County with the goal of erecting structures to build explosives for the war – and in 1945 when the Department of Defense bought 2,600 aces in St. Louis County to store and test ordnance.
These two industrial complexes helped win WW2, but they also gave us refined uranium, the core element of the atomic bomb that later became a prolific power source. Today much of the electricity in the U.S. is fueled by nuclear power plants and huge research laboratories are crafting fission batteries that can power televisions, radios, computers and cell phones.
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In Weldon Spring a massive factory was erected to manufacture TNT and DNT to supply Allied troops in Word War II. Over next three years the Weldon Spring Ordnance Works would grow to 1,000 buildings, with 5,000 workers, eating up carload after carload of sand and gravel from Pacific. The TNT plant closed the day the Japanese surrendered in 1945.
The Atomic Energy Commission purchased a small patch of land, about 2,000 acres on the site, and built a uranium ore processing plant, the Weldon Spring Uranium Feed Mill Plant, which was operated by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works of St. Louis that processed raw uranium ore into “yellow cake,” or concentrated ore there until 1966.
As scientists became aware of the harmful effects of uranium exposure, the massive site was abandoned and went through decades of scandal and delayed cleanup efforts. Today its a tourist attraction that invites thousands of curious visitors each year to climb to the top of the 75-foot tall dome of buried contaminated debris to read the placards that tell the story of building the industrial complex along with the sad tale of the three small communities that disappeared in 1940 to make way for the world’s largest explosives factory.
After Mallinckrodt Chemical Company perfected the process of refining raw uranium for the atomic bomb, they refined so much uranium that they ran out of space in their St. Louis processing plant.
The Atomic Energy Commission bought 2,600 acres of swampy land where I-44 crosses the Meramec and built the Tyson Valley Powder Farm – a storage site for radioactive materials. Records show that at the end of 1946, 206,110 pounds of uranium metal were stored at this location for the Manhattan Engineer District. According to the Wall Street Journal the Atomic Energy Commission built 50 concrete igloos at Tyson Valley. Some can still be seen tucked among the trees and lakes.
Today Lone Elk Park occupies a corner of the former Tyson Valley Powder Farm.
But this story is not meant to highlight uranium and the atomic bomb, but is offered to create a record of one man’s view of the heady years in Pacific when the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission scrambled for building material as they threw up gigantic industrial complexes and storage facilities at warp speed.
The building of Weldon Spring and Tyson Valley created a twenty-year economic boon in Pacific, not seen since the Missouri Pacific Railroad moved its car repair shop out of town after the collapse of the Great Railroad Shopmen’s strike of 1922.
“At least 150 carloads of gravel and sand went out of Pacific every day,” Mr. Brundick said. “In Weldon Springs, where they made the TNT, they couldn’t get enough gravel and sand to build that place.”
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“And then at what they call Tyson Valley, they built all those concrete huts, about twenty by forty, where they stored explosive TNT,” he said. “It was so powerful and so easy to set off it came in hanging in sacks inside of barrels so it was never touched by anyone.”
Mr. Brundick may have been conservative in his estimate of sand and gravel shipments from Pacific. In 1941 and 1942 local newspaper articles reported that 250 railroad cars of sand and gavel were shipped daily from Pacific. According to local railroad guru Jim Schwinkendorf, each car carried an estimated 35 tons – thats seventeen million, five hundred thousand pounds of sand and gravel each day. This calls up a vision of railroad hopper cars lined through the city and points beyond.
The gravel plants offered the only good paying jobs available to former railroad workers when railroad car shop closed. The editor of the Pacific Transcript reported the effect that the building boon had on Pacific.
“Few people seem to realize the enormous amount of freight, mainly sand and gravel, that goes out of Pacific each month,” he wrote in October 1942. “Some little thought might also be given to the total weekly payroll of these plants. It runs into thousands of dollars monthly and means a great deal to Pacific workmen and business men. Without these plants and their payroll there would be very little employment here. As it is, our city enjoys a community income that compares very favorably with any city in Franklin County.”
Mr. Brundick claimed to have a lifelong fascination with all things mechanical. He said he grew up in Pacific at a time when local boys were trusted to roam around town and the railroad workers in the repair shop allowed them to come inside and watch whatever they were working on. It was his childhood dream to become a train engineer.
He was not yet ten years old, when the first gravel plant was built on the Meramec River next to his father’s farm at the east end of Orleans Street. He told how he would sit on the riverbank and watch the dredging operation.
There were five Pacific gravel plants on the Meramec River at Pacific during the war years, he said, all were on the Frisco Railroad line. A unique set of moving equipment would transport the dredged gravel to rail cars on both the Frisco and the Missouri Pacific lines.
Mr. Brundick descried the wonder of the dredging process of his childhood in his oral presentation.
“There were tall poles on each side of the river. They had a big steam boiler down there and they had a bucket that would go down and go across the river. They would slack the cable off and the bucket would set down and they’d drag it through the gravel. And then they’d tighten up the line that went to the pole on the top, and the bucket would come up. And they had some kind of a thing up there that this bucket would hit, and it would dump into the cars.”
Mr. Brundick was not alone in his fascination with the mechanical marvel. One local resident – movie man Henry Hirth – was so enthralled with this mechanical marvel that he built a miniature working replica of the dredge that he demonstrated for neighborhood youngsters. (See Sidebar)
Mr. Brundick with his romantic view of all things mechanical left a verbal picture of the sand gravel business during the years that U.S. government was in a rush to build facilities needed to make the first atomic bomb. His complete 1993 oral presentation was published in a “Memoir of Growing Up in a Railroad Town.”
