SONS OF MARTHA (Construction of the City of Old Hickory)
     By Dixon Merritt
     Published by Mason & Hanger Company, Inc.
     1928 New York City

Note:

This article is from a chapter in a book published in 1928 by the Mason & Hanger Company. The book describes the 100-year history of the company that built Old Hickory in 1918 in a period of eight months and a day. The company was the major contractor selected by the U. S. Government to construct the world's largest smokeless powder plant to support the Allies during World War I.

This chapter, entitled Old Hickory, describes the massive requirements of labor and material used to build the manufacturing plant and all of the supporting structures and facilities that became Old Hickory.

Chapter XVII
Old Hickory

When the United States declared war on Germany, there were not in this country any facilities whatever for manufacturing powder in the enormous quantities that would be necessary in order to prosecute the war energetically to a successful conclusion. It became immediately evident that the erection of a number of large powder manufacturing plants would be necessary. The locating of suitable sites and other preliminary work was begun at once, but the United States had been a party to the war for almost a year before construction work was actually begun on the largest of them.

The site for this plant, designed to be the largest smokeless powder manufacturing establishment in the world, was in Hadley's Bend of the Cumberland River, in Davidson County, Tennessee, about eighteen miles northeast of Nashville. It was reached, indirectly, from two main roads but not directly by any. To the south of it, on the right bank of the Cumberland, was the Lebanon Pike--the old main road from Nashville to the East--, but the great bend in the river left a gap of seven miles or so between this road and the site of the plant. To the north of it, on the left bank of the Cumberland, ran the Gallatin Pike--the old Louisville and Nashville Turnpike--hardly more than a stone's throw from the site of the plant but with the unbridged river between.

This very quality of isolation was one of the principal considerations in the selection of that site as the location of the greatest of all powder plants. Hundreds of miles from the seaboard, practically surrounded by the Cumberland River and thus thoroughly protected, with easy access to the abundance of water needed both for construction and for operation, sufficiently far removed from any city or town to obviate the danger of exposing large populations to explosions, near enough to the coal fields of Tennessee and Kentucky to insure an ample and easily secured supply of fuel, it was almost an ideal location for so mammoth a manufactory of explosives.

The country round about had been, a hundred years before, the home community of Andrew Jackson. Not far away his ashes lie in the garden of his mansion, The Hermitage, a national shrine more beautiful and impressive, in some respects, than Mount Vernon. The plant, and the new city of which it was the center and life, was to take its official name that which was the nickname of the intrepid old warrior--Old Hickory. Perhaps, too, those who carried the enterprise through were to absorb from the surroundings something of the boundless energy and indomitable courage of Jackson. Something of the sort undoubtedly inspired them.

On March 10, 1918, Hadley's Bend was a little neighborhood of half a score of farms--a sedate, slow-moving, old-fashioned and somewhat aristocratic cluster of country families. On November 11 of that year, the day of the signing of the Armistice, Hadley's Bend became the manufacturing city of Old Hickory, capable of housing and caring for a population of a hundred thousand, and with a plant which, though nowhere complete, was turning out 500,000 pounds of powder a day. Plant, city, railroad, highways and streets, water system, what not--all had been constructed in the period of eight months and a day.

Though fought a fourth of the distance around the world from the front line trenches, the building of Old Hickory was one of the greatest battles of the World War. Perhaps it was the battle which broke the spirit of Germany, sent William Holenzollern scurrying to exile across the Dutch border, ended the war months before it would have ended otherwise and saved multiplied thousands of lives. It proved, what the German had never until that time believed, that America could in a time incredibly short prepare for warfare on a scale that Germany's forty years of preparation never had approached.

The credit belongs, of course, to the American Government, the American people, the spirit of America at war. But the chief instruments in accomplishing the result were the DuPont Engineering Company, as agent of the Government, and the Mason & Hanger Company, as the largest of the sub-contractors. In order that the reader may appreciate the importance and the colossal proportions of those results, the main features of achievement must be set forth in detail.

The first thing to be done, of course, was to secure as quickly as possible an adequate supply of both common and skilled labor, as well as mechanics in almost every trade.

The Employment Department began operation on Sunday, February 10. By the following Saturday, the first pay day, 1,178 laborers were on the job. During the second week it was found that labor was being recruited faster than the work was developing. It must be remembered that many other war projects were in progress all over the country, that the demand for labor was unprecedented, and yet within fourteen days this department was forging ahead of the construction requirements. Throughout the time that the work was in progress seventy-five per cent of all labor was recruited by the Employment Department of the Mason & Hanger Company with an organization which numbered only forty-six at its maximum strength. Of this number, seven acted as labor scouts, recruiting workers in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana. All in all, about 100,000 men were recruited from these States.