Qualla: West Virginia Ordnance Works

West Virginia Ordnance Works: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1942, the U.S. Army built a TNT factory on 8,323 acres of farmland north of Point Pleasant, hired 3,500 workers, and spent forty-five million wartime dollars assembling boilers, acid plants, and concrete bunkers across what had been pasture. By 1945, the war ended and the plant shut down. The Army sold off the land, and the bunkers were left where they stood. Three decades later, in November 1966, two young couples driving past those same concrete domes reported being chased by a winged creature with red eyes. Three decades after that, in 1981, fishermen began noticing that the ponds inside what was now a wildlife refuge had turned a reddish color. The TNT had been seeping into the groundwater for forty years. Few American landscapes have absorbed quite this many strange chapters in a single century.

West Virginia Ordnance Works: Wartime Industry at Full Throttle

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The West Virginia Ordnance Works was one of dozens of TNT plants the Army built in 1941 and 1942 to feed an artillery-and-bomb economy that was suddenly fighting on three continents. The site north of Point Pleasant offered flat ground, river access for shipping, and an existing ...

West Virginia Ordnance Works: Carved Up After the War

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 8,323 acres did not stay together long. Some of the land became the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, where today hunters track deer and birders chase warblers through the marshes that grew up around the abandoned bunkers. About 2,788 acres went to the state for wildlife us...

West Virginia Ordnance Works: The Red Water

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Around 1979, fishermen working the McClintic ponds began reporting an unusual reddish tint to the water around certain bunkers. Testing in 1981 found what wartime TNT factories tend to leave behind: trinitrotoluene itself, plus dinitrotoluene and various breakdown products, all o...

West Virginia Ordnance Works: Where the Sightings Began

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was in this landscape - the bunkers, the marshes, the abandoned acid plant - that Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette claimed, on the night of November 15, 1966, to have encountered something with red eyes and folded wings near what locals called 'the TNT are...

West Virginia Ordnance Works: Flying Over the Aftermath

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air, the old ordnance works reads as a strange checkerboard of land uses: the long runway of Mason County Airport in one corner, the green of the wildlife management area filling most of the middle, an industrial park stretching toward the river, and the scattered dots o...