University of Virginia Library

VI
Manufacturing War Goods

Months before Pearl Harbor, Charlottesville and Albemarle County
were already feeling the defense boom. Local corporations in 1941
had their best year since 1929 with earnings of practically all of
them above those reported in 1940. Many were able to declare
extra dividends at the end of the year. Expansion projects were completed
by Frank Ix and Sons, the Crozet Cold Storage Corporation,
the Lee Bakery Company, and O. E. & C. L. Hawkins. The Monticello
Dairy, Crozet Cold Storage, and other firms took advantage
of prosperity to refund outstanding bonds. All three Charlottesville
banks declared larger dividends than those of the preceding year.
The Alberene Stone Corporation of Virginia, employing nearly
500 people, turned out more than a hundred carloads of soapstone
per month, with sixty per cent of this production going into national
defense work.[1]

Cooperation was the keynote of the Albemarle war effort. In
the first months of the war when it was feared that government contracts
might pass Charlottesville by, one city organization after another
declared in favor of a program for bringing war orders to the
county. The Retail Merchants Association, the Young Men's Business
Club, and the Business and Professional Women's Club were
joined by several of the civic clubs in this move. In order to coordinate
these efforts an Advisory Planning Board was organized on
August 15, 1942, composed of representatives from these clubs, the
Chamber of Commerce, the City Council, the County Board of Supervisors,
and other organizations.[2] The business organization of
the community was further strengthened in October when Leonard
H. Peterson was named executive secretary of the Charlottesville and
Albemarle County Chamber of Commerce to fill a vacancy of several
months' duration.[3]

As soon as the nation had actually been plunged into war, local
businessmen went into high gear. In May, 1943, Peterson described
what was happening in Charlottesville:

By the end of 1943 local war production had reached its peak.
The fifteen leading manufacturing industries in that year employed
an average of 2,400 persons and produced $13,250,000 worth of
goods, of which eighty per cent was classifiable as war material.[5]
The pressure of this increased production was felt in every phase of
the community's economic life. Stores, inundated by increased business,
struggled in vain to find workers to handle it. Laundries were
overwhelmed as their employees disappeared. Sometimes it took three
weeks to get a clean shirt. Four times during the war the Home
Laundry, for example, had to stop collections until it had worked
itself out from under the pile of soiled clothes it had already gathered.[6]
The Daily Progress, confronted with the newsprint shortage,
decreased the number of its pages and on Saturdays shrank to tabloid
size, eliminating advertising.

In spite of every handicap, these businesses were able to contribute
to the war effort. The stores sold war bonds and participated in
other campaigns. The newspaper gave its columns generously to
all war drives. Radio station WCHV devoted one-third of its time
to community war service. An outstanding example of its enterprise
came before dawn of D-Day. Knowing the intense interest
with which local families were awaiting the news of the opening
of the second front, WCHV promised to announce the beginning of
the invasion by telephone to all its listeners who would send in their
names and telephone numbers to the station. By the night of June
5, 1944, WCHV had accumulated a list of 175 advertisers and public

officials and 125 families with sons in the service. About 1:00
A. M., Eastern War Time, on the morning of June 6, 1944, just as
the first troops were hitting the Normandy beaches, Charles Barham,
Jr., an owner of the station, was aroused by the United Press.
Immediately he called his manager, Randolph Bean, and forty-five
minutes later WCHV went on the air. By three o'clock, when the
authenticity of the news was established, Barham began to send out
the promised notifications with the aid of two operators provided
by the Virginia Telephone and Telegraph Company. Within an
hour and a half 300 telephones were jangling in the ears of sleeping
residents of Charlottesville to bring them the exciting news that
D-Day had arrived.

As the intensity of the war effort increased, it became unnecessary
to seek business, since local industry had more than it could
handle. With Selective Service draining off more and more of the
potential labor supply, it became almost impossible to replace employees
departing for military service. As early as 1941, in anticipation
of the rapid expansion of defense industries, special free industrial
arts classes had been set up in Charlottesville to train men and
women in the skills needed in war plants, but the number trained in
these classes was only a fraction of those needed.

By the spring of 1944, local manufacturers and other business men
decided to meet the emergency by mobilizing all available manpower.
A group of employers, therefore, launched the Charlottesville Go-To-Work
campaign. Setting up headquarters with borrowed furniture
in the showroom of Earl H. Vaughan, successor to Burnley
Brothers Coal Company, a committee began an enthusiastic five
months' campaign on April 10. A large banner stretched across West
Main Street, and bold posters in the headquarters windows called the
attention of all passers-by to the need for workers. There were frequent
appeals on the radio for war production volunteers. All this
advertising brought in a total of 411 applicants; even three town
derelicts were inspired to enlist. Of this total, 366 persons were
referred to available jobs and at least one out of every four was hired.
Since this response fell far short of filling the demand, the campaign
shifted to a thorough house-to-house canvass undertaken by teachers
from the city schools under the direction of Mrs. J. Tevis Michie.
All this ringing of door bells disclosed only 208 persons who were
willing and able to go to work. Anxious employers sent postcards
to these applicants asking them to report for an interview, and in at
least two instances the employers were so eager that they went after
the applicants in person. In most cases, however, those interviewed
showed little interest in the jobs.[7]

The bottom of the manpower barrel had been scraped as bare as
Mother Hubbard's cupboard. This labor shortage was in large measure
offset by overtime work. Indeed, there were very few wage

earners in war industry who did not work more than the standard
forty-hour week. While “time and a half” and even “double time”
for overtime and holiday work made a strong appeal to all and played
a great part in securing the necessary man-hours, yet most factory employees
were also impelled by a high sense of patriotic duty. Willing
hands were found to make the millions of dollars worth of important
war goods which poured from the factories of Charlottesville
and Albemarle County.

Textile Mills

One of the most important records of achievement was that of the
plant of Frank Ix and Sons, Inc. Paradoxically, the Ix war output
was devoted primarily to the preservation rather than to the destruction
of life. Ix silk looms had switched from luxurious crepes and
satins to parachute fabrics long before Pearl Harbor. In fact, in
August of 1941 the company completed an extension, at the cost of
$128,000 of its own funds, which increased its monthly capacity by
422,400 yards of parachute cloth.[8] First silk and later nylon were
woven into fabrics designed to save the life of the aviator leaping
from his doomed plane. The Ix looms also turned out rayon which
was used for parachutes to drop supplies to men in isolated spots or
to retard the speed of descending flares. Ix 'chute fabrics served a
deadly purpose only on fragmentation bombs. Parachutes were attached
to these bombs to delay their descent until the plane dropping
them was safely out of range. The local Ix mill, working a 168-hour
week, together with the firm's New Holland, Pennsylvania, factory
turned out these fabrics so rapidly that one of the trade papers acclaimed
them as “the country's largest manufacturer of parachute
cloth.”[9] In this production the Charlottesville mill outstripped its
family rival.

Further protection to American airmen was provided by Ix-woven
textiles for use in flak suits and flak curtains, which shielded fliers
from anti-aircraft fragments. Another use of Ix fabrics was in the
manufacture of G-suits, designed to lessen the effect of gravity on
pilots in dives and turns. The Charlottesville mill also developed a
special “rip-stop” cloth for airplane wings. This was woven in small,
seamed squares, which kept bullet holes from turning into dangerous
tears.

Far from being a war baby, the Ix mill first became known in Virginia
industrial circles in 1928, but not until 1945 was a Virginia
charter secured for the local plant. Under the direction of Frank Ix,
Jr., the plant grew from 50 employees in 1929 to 370 in 1941; the
wartime peak of 650 workers was reached in 1945. By this time
the $47,000 annual payroll of 1929 had increased more than twenty-fold,
and yearly wage payments amounted to over $1,000,000.[10]

During the war years ten per cent of this payroll went regularly
into the purchase of war bonds. National recognition for the Ix contributions
to the war effort came first on September 26, 1942, in the
form of a Minute Man Flag from the U. S. Treasury Department.
This award was authorized when ninety per cent of the employees
put ten per cent of their gross earnings into war bonds through payroll
allotments. For four years, 1942–1945, the Ix workers participated
a hundred per cent in the payroll allotment plan. During the
Third War Loan the employees each contributed an entire week's pay
to the purchase of bonds in addition to their regular payroll allotment.[11]

The company's production excellence was recognized on April 17,
1943, with the awarding of the coveted Army-Navy “E”. The official
presentation a month later on May 16 was a proud moment in
the history of Charlottesville, marking the first time such an award
had been given in this area. In fact, at that time only two per cent
of the industrial plants of the nation engaged in war work had received
this honor. Governor Colgate W. Darden, Jr., spoke at the
ceremony, stressing the fact that the Ix plant had become absorbed in
the life of the community in which it was located. In accepting the
award Frank Ix, Jr., praised the spirit of teamwork and the intense
determination for victory manifested by the workers. Stars indicating
a renewal of the honor were added to the “E” pennant on February
19, 1944, September 9, 1944, and April 23, 1945.[12]

The local war industry suffered all the usual trouble of labor
shortages, transportation difficulties, and scarcity of raw materials. In
December, 1943, the company through an advertisement in The Daily
Progress pleaded with “Girls Over 18—Also Boys Over 16” to start
to work at wages from $20.80 a week. The draft continued to take
more experienced workers; by April, 1945, some 212 former employees
were in the service.[13] In the face of such losses it was no mean
task to live up to the Army-Navy “E”. The training program for
new workers was accelerated so rapidly that young women after a
short period of training were performing jobs that had once been
handled only by men with as much as four years of training. Commuting
problems were solved by a well developed share-the-ride program
and by a special bus which brought in employees from surrounding
communities. At the same time houses were purchased or
built as homes for employees brought into the community.[14]

The character of the Ix workers is indicated by the record they set
for safety. The plant on November 1, 1944, started a period of operation
without a single accident serious enough to cause an employee to
lose time from his work. On July 9, 1945, the mill carried this
record of safe operation through 1,250,000 man-hours, entitling it to
a Certificate of Merit issued by the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company

The Ix mill in Charlottesville receives the first star for its “E” pennant.

for conspicuous achievement in accident prevention. By the
time the award was made, on August 6, the workers had already
added another month to this record and were still going strong.[15] Not
until December 18, 1946, was there an accident to break the record.
By that time 3,251,932 accident-free man-hours of work had been
attained. The Certificate of Merit joined the Minute Man Flag and
the thrice-starred Army-Navy “E” burgee in the honors garnered by
this Charlottesville plant.

Also prized is a letter now in an honored spot in the company's
scrapbook. It was written by Lieutenant General A. A. Vandegrift,
Commandant of the Marine Corps and a native of Charlottesville.
The general expressed his appreciation for the “Navy scarfs”—neckties
to civilians—sent him as a gift by one of the leading war industries
in his home town. Many a Marine, Army, and Navy airman
probably felt even more keenly a sense of appreciation for the
wartime contribution of the nation's largest producer of parachute
cloth.

Not only the cloth for parachute canopies but also shroud lines
were produced in Charlottesville. The Virginia Braid Company
began manufacturing 'chute cords early in 1941, changing over from
its peacetime output of furniture cord and dress braid. Absorbed by
Virginia Textiles, Inc., November 1, 1944, the plant continued to
produce parachute lines, as well as cords for tents, cargo covers, and
uniforms.[16]

Cloth for uniforms came from a veteran producer of military fabrics.
Since 1935 the Charlottesville Woolen Mills had been turning
out goods for Navy uniforms. Cadets at the United States Military
Academy at West Point, New York, Virginia Military Institute, and
Virginia Polytechnic Institute were usually clad in Charlottesville-woven
fabrics. The war therefore meant only an acceleration of normal
production up to the rate of 15,000 yards a month, or a half-million
dollars a year in value. Most of this cloth was taken by the
Navy.

Three other local textile plants took part in the war effort. Henderson
and Ervin, peacetime manufacturer of men's and women's
clothing under the “Rockingchair” brand, began producing uniforms
for Red Cross nurses in February, 1942, and six months later added
hospital uniforms for Army nurses. Shirtwaists for WACs and Red
Cross workers were also manufactured. War production leaped from
26,808 units in 1942 to 84,282 in 1944, while employment rose
from 88 to 128.[17] The plant of the Monticello Shirt Company,
taken over by Knothe Brothers, Inc., produced men's shorts for the
Army at the rate of 100,000 a year. Construction begun shortly
after the end of the war doubled the capacity of this factory.[18] The
Albemarle Weaving Company attempted to convert its looms, designed

for producing upholstery and drapery materials, to war purposes,
but was unable to secure the necessary priorities for the equipment.
The company therefore had to continue its peacetime products
with the result that output dropped from 750,000 yards in 1941 to
350,000 in 1944, while employment shrank from 250 in 1941 to
64 in 1945. A small percentage of this production, however, did
find its way into military service.[19]

Machine Shops

Among the heavier industries the Southern Welding and Machine
Company provided a rags-to-riches success story in the best Horatio
Alger tradition. The firm began in the depression thirties with little
capital other than the ingenuity and enterprise of its two partners,
R. R. Harmon and J. Tevis Michie. Its first plant was a small, abandoned
building, which leaned at a tired angle, and its first order
brought in only twenty-five cents. With no regular products of its
own, the firm became a custom foundry and machine shop, taking in
whatever business it could locate. When orders were slow, Harmon,
who was plant manager, worked on his special interest, experimental
models of gas purification and combustion equipment, and acquired
a number of patents in the process. Whatever profits were made were
devoted to the expansion of the shops and the purchase of discarded
machinery, which was moved in and put back into condition.

By 1939 this careful management had expanded the operation to
twenty-five employees and an annual business of $50,000. The next
summer brought the company its first defense order, a contract to
produce electrical stuffing tubes for the United States Coast Guard.
These tubes were used to conduct electrical wiring through bulkheads
—“partitions,” in landlubber language. The success of this initial
contract soon brought follow-up orders from the Navy, the Maritime
Commission, and private shipbuilders. Tens of thousands of
these tubes were delivered at prices well below the cost which the Navy
had established on the basis of its own production.

Another early order came as a result of the Harmon patents. To
expand the nation's output of sulphuric acid it was decided to convert
the Ducktown, Tennessee, plant of the Tennessee Copper Company
from the chamber process to the contact acid process. Gas purification
equipment controlled by some of Harmon's patents was selected
for use in the new plant, and his firm designed, built, and
supervised the installation of the equipment. This was the first time
that a wet process for purifying roaster gases for sulphuric acid production
had ever been used. The Charlottesville equipment proved
much superior to the apparatus it replaced, and its increased yield of
sulphuric acid helped to make possible the vast expansion in the
nation's output of TNT which followed.

Southern Welding's greatest achievement, however, was its contribution
to the building of the vast carrier fleet which eventually swept
the Japanese Navy off the seas. An essential part of these mobile
airfields is a device for halting the planes as they come in for a landing.
When the ship's aircraft are in the air, a series of cables are stretched
across the flightdeck. A hook in the tail of a landing plane grasps
one of these cables, and the resulting drag slows down the aircraft
and brings it to a stop. The cable is a part of a complicated assembly
called a flight-arresting gear, which must be constructed to have just
the right amount of “give.” Too much or too little elasticity may
injure both plane and pilot. Southern Welding proved so adept at
constructing these delicate mechanisms that the company was given
the task of outfitting scores of carriers. At one time in 1943 it was
working on flight-arresting gears for forty-five different carriers being
built by the Navy and private shipyards.

The Charlottesville firm also provided many flat-tops with crash
barriers. These were raised at the end of the flight deck to keep a
plane from toppling into the sea when the arresting gear failed to halt
it, and they had to be strong enough to stop a dive-bomber careening
across the deck at sixty miles an hour. Another carrier device produced
by Southern Welding was the spotting dolly. This was a four-wheeled
mobile jack, which lifted the planes and moved them about,
simplifying the problem of parking in the narrow spaces of the carrier
hold. One more product for naval aviators was the bridle-catcher
assembly used on catapult mechanisms.

While the company was going “all out” for the Navy pilots, it
somehow managed also to produce for the Army such miscellaneous
items as caps, bases, and nose-closing plugs for 90-pound fragmentation
or anti-personnel bombs; hydraulic control devices for flying
bombs; bomb band trunnions for 500-pound bombs; trail casters for
gun carriages; gun platforms for 40-millimeter anti-aircraft guns;
and trick wheels for landing craft.

Some idea of the changes this production meant for Southern Welding
can be gained from the fact that its sales mushroomed from
$67,000 in 1940 to more than $1,000,000 in 1943, an increase of
about 1,900 per cent since 1939. The plant itself more than tripled
in area between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender, growing
from 16,000 to 53,000 square feet of floor space. The expanded
facilities included a large fabrication shop, a boiler house, and a private
railroad siding, all built in large part of salvaged materials. The
trusses of the fabricating shop came from the dismantled Sixth Avenue
Elevated Railway in New York City, and the only items the Chesapeake
and Ohio Railway supplied for the siding were the switch and
a signal light. New equipment was brought in at a cost of $72,000,
of which $43,000 came from the company's funds.

This rapid expansion placed a severe strain on working capital.
Money to pay wages and bills for raw materials had to be borrowed
from a local bank until payment arrived for completed contracts.
Growing with mounting inventories, the loan eventually reached ten
per cent of the bank's deposits, the legal maximum for a single loan.
Additional funds then had to be secured through the Federal Reserve
Bank, with the Navy guaranteeing repayment. Raw materials were
often as hard to find as money. While the firm had top priorities,
this meant merely the right to buy the material if it could be located.
Nevertheless, the company usually managed to get its deliveries
through on time and never caused an important delay in production.

Southern Welding's biggest problem, however, was recruiting and
training its labor force. Employment jumped from 25 in 1939 to
a peak of 204 in 1943, but it proved impossible to hold this many
workers under wartime conditions. Forty-eight employees left to
enter the armed forces. Training the industrial recruits required managerial
ingenuity. When the company took on the crash barrier contract,
it discovered that its new and unskilled workers could not read
the blueprints. The management went to work and produced a set
of drawings of a different and more readily understandable type. Delighted
with the results of this initiative, the Navy incorporated the
drawings into a manual for use aboard all carriers on which this type
of crash barrier was installed.

While producing vital war materiel, the Southern Welding and
Machine Company earned the right to fly the U. S. Treasury Department
Minute Man Flag and the Army-Navy “E” burgee with three
white stars. When the first award of the Army-Navy “E” was announced
in January, 1944, J. Tevis Michie remarked that “all credit
must go to our employees for the splendid job they have done on war
contracts.” The presentation of the “E” flag was made in the company's
fabrication shop on February 26 by Captain Edgar M. Williams,
U. S. Navy, the commanding officer of the V - 12 unit at the
University of Virginia. At the same time Brigadier General E. R.
Warner McCabe, U. S. Army, commanding officer of the School of
Military Government, presented award pins to each of the company's
employees. Stars signifying continuing outstanding excellence in war
production during subsequent six-month periods were added on July
24, 1944, January 29, 1945, and September 1, 1945.

The company's problems after V-J Day exceeded anything which
had been experienced in the hectic days of the war. When a nationwide
strike of steel workers in January, 1946, threatened to shut off
the firm's supply of its chief raw material for postwar production of
bulldozers, road scrapers, earth movers, food processing equipment,
and other custom-built appliances, 88 out of 103 employees joined
the two partners of the firm in denouncing federal labor policies which

Captain Williams presents to Southern Welding's partners their first
“E” flag.

permitted such a strike to occur. Their protest and constructive criticism
took the form of an open letter to the President of the United
States which was published at their own expense in a full-page advertisement
in the local newspaper. Copies of it were sent to Virginia
delegates in Congress as well as to the President. The threatened
shut-down, following an unavoidable slow-down, materialized in February,
1946, and lasted two weeks. Soon after steel could be
obtained again, the company had secured sufficient orders to justify
increasing the work week from forty hours to fifty-four. With the
lifting of the Federal lid on wages, three general wage increases were
voluntarily instituted. Although business was well below the wartime
peak, it was still more than four times the average of 1939, indicating
that this infant industry had grown to maturity.[20]

Another metal-working firm, N. W. Martin and Brothers, continued
its peacetime production of roof and sheet metal through 1942.
Its output was used in the construction of Camp Lee, Fort Belvoir,
and the Woodrow Wilson General Hospital near Staunton, Virginia.
In 1943, however, the firm took an entirely new line, the molding of
plastics, when it received a contract to make noses for Black Widows.
The nature of this work was a well-guarded secret for several years
until military developments permitted the Army to release the story
of its deadly night fighter. Making plastic noses for the plane should
have presented a problem for sheet-metal workers, but Martin and
Brothers earned the commendation of the Air Technical Service Command
for the way in which they handled the job. Instead of waiting
for the necessary new equipment to arrive, the firm set to work to
produce the machinery in its own shops. At the same time employees
were trained in the new processes so that equipment and workers were
ready to start the job simultaneously. This enterprise enabled the
Martins to turn out noses for two thousand Black Widows.[21]

Quarries

Out in the county the Alberene Stone Corporation of Virginia
found military uses for its soapstone. Although the company had no
direct contracts with the government, it estimated that nearly three
million dollars worth of its product went into war purposes. Soapstone
from its Albemarle County and Nelson County quarries was
manufactured into laboratory and photographic development equipment,
such as table-tops, trays, and fume hoods for Army and Navy
hospitals, air bases, and even aircraft carriers. Similar products were
made for the new industrial plants which multiplied the nation's
capacity for aluminum, high octane gasoline, and synthetic rubber.
Stone tubs were shipped to the Panama Canal Zone and to San Juan.
Puerto Rico, as well as to the Quantico Marine Barracks and the
Norfolk Naval Operating Base.

The difficulties encountered by the Alberene company were typical

of the problems faced by industry in general. Of the nearly 500 employees
working in 1941, about 150 entered the armed forces and
many others left for higher-paid jobs. Government orders lifting
the minimum wage to fifty cents an hour raised operating costs, as
did another directive requiring the plant to go on a forty-eight hour
week. These increases nibbled away at the profit margin until declining
orders finally put the plant into the red in 1944. Not until
August of that year, however, did the government permit an increase
in ceiling prices and then only ten per cent. President John S.
Graves of Charlottesville said of his experience: “Too many agencies
—too much red tape—too many conflicting regulations and reports.”

To top off the company's troubles, on September 18, 1944, a flash
flood resulting from twenty inches of rainfall did over $45,000
worth of damage. Water rose ten and a half feet in the mill and over
six feet in the commissary and offices. This was ten feet higher than
it had ever before gone. Eight of the largest fills of the Nelson and
Albemarle Railroad, a company subsidiary over which it shipped, were
washed away, and service was interrupted for over two months. The
flood also damaged the tracks of both the Chesapeake and Ohio and
the Southern railways, particularly the roadbed of the latter in the
southern part of the county.[22]

Another Albemarle mineral product which enlisted for the duration
was slate. The Blue Ridge Slate Corporation was fortunate in
being able to continue all its regular peacetime products except roofing
slate. New machinery added during the war doubled its capacity
and enabled it to shorten the 168-hour week it had operated during
1941. The firm's output of slate roofing granules and flour rose from
14,000 tons in 1939 to 18,000 in 1941 and then gradually declined
to 14,500 tons in 1944. The company estimated that eighty
per cent of this production went indirectly to the War Department
and to Lend-Lease.

Miscellaneous

A third county business expanded its plant just in time to take a
prominent part in the war effort. Founded in 1929, the Crozet Cold
Storage Corporation was merely a warehouse for Albemarle-grown
fruit until 1941. In that year the company added quick-freezing
facilities to process foods. The outbreak of hostilities made this plant
even more valuable than had been expected. In the four years, 1941–
1944, it stored 155,000 bushels of Albemarle apples and 35,000
bushels of local peaches. In addition it was pressed into service to
process 26,000 bushels of snap beans for the government. To supply
so many “snaps” was far beyond the capacity of Albemarle farmers,
and beans came from Tennessee and North Carolina to be processed
at Crozet. The plant was also called upon to freeze and store five
million pounds of poultry. Another function it performed was to
serve as a sort of “staging area” for frozen foods. Sometimes refrigerator

cars loaded with such foods as meat, eggs, and lard for overseas
consignment arrived in the East when no shipping space was
available. In such cases the cars had to be routed to a plant like the
one at Crozet where food could be stored until shipping was available.[23]

Another firm with a big part in the war effort was the Barnes Lumber
Corporation, which filled government contracts amounting to
nearly $2,000,000. It supplied to the Army and Navy its peacetime
products, oak flooring and millwork, as well as thousands of
feet of special-purpose lumber. This company made crates for antiaircraft
guns, boxes for ammunition, and wooden pallets to expedite
the handling of goods in warehouses and shipping. Its most curious
product was a large quantity of wooden discs, designed to counteract
magnetic mines. Suffering from the usual problems, the company
saw its workers decline from 360 in 1941 to 220 in 1944, even
though it sent out its own trucks to bring the employees to their jobs.[24]

At least three other city firms turned out war goods. The Charlottesville
Lumber Company used its experience in manufacturing
window sash and door frames to produce prefabricated barracks and
radar buildings as well as crates for one and one-half ton trucks.[25]
The Essex Corporation turned out thousands of fountain pens, while
L. H. Wiebel, Inc., manufactured 22,000,000 wooden insulator pins
and brackets for the telephone lines laid by the United States Signal
Corps all around the world. Even the blind were able to do their
part. The superintendent of the Virginia Workshop for the Blind
reported that his sightless workers in five years had produced 118,150
brooms and 108,952 mattresses for the use of the Army and Navy.

Government Owned Plant

Newest and most modern of all the Albemarle County industries
was one which was born only in the late years of the war. In the
winter of 1943–1944 the growing demand for heavy-duty tires for
trucks and planes made necessary the expansion of rayon tire cord
production. On January 12, 1944, the United States Rubber Company
decided to locate a new plant somewhere in Central Virginia.
Two days later two company officials were in Charlottesville looking
for a suitable site. When Scottsville was recommended, the U. S.
Rubber men secured the cooperation of town officials in selecting a
location just west of the town.[26]

A hitch developed when one of the landowners demanded a hundred
dollars an acre more than the U. S. Defense Plants Corporation,
which was to build this government-owned war industrial facility,
was willing to pay, but the Scottsville Lions Club agreed to underwrite
the difference, which amounted to $3,490. This obligation was
later assumed by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, along
with a debt of $2,623 incurred by the town of Scottsville in extending

water and sewer mains to the new plant. Scottsville furnished
$6,944 as its share of the cost of enlarging the municipal water plant,
while a grant of $5,942 from the Federal Works Agency covered the
rest.[27] Vigorous local initiative thus secured the construction of the
third largest of seven government owned war plants built in Virginia
for operation by private firms.

Early in April, 1944, ground was broken for the new plant, and
on May 24 came a momentous day in the history of Scottsville. Hundreds
of people came from miles around to witness the laying of the
cornerstone. Governor Colgate W. Darden, Jr., welcomed the plant
to the state and called it a significant step towards achieving for Virginia
an economy in which agriculture would be balanced with industry.
Other speakers included C. T. O'Neill, chairman of the Central
Virginia Planning Commission, O. L. Ward, plant-manager-to-be,
and H. E. Humphreys, Jr., vice-president of the U. S. Rubber
Company.[28]

While construction was going on, the company, which leased the
plant from the government, began training local workers to handle
the new machines. The first employees moved into the building on
October 2, although installation of the machinery was not completed
for another six weeks.[29] The building which these new workers entered
was something new and different, a near-approach to the pushbutton
factory envisioned by industrial designers. The brick and
steel structure was a large, one-story building, 444 feet long and
264 feet wide, without a single window except in the managerial
offices. Fluorescent lights and an air-conditioning system which
changed the air every four to six minutes provided weather-proof
working conditions. Humidity and temperature controls kept the
worker comfortable and made rayon spinning easier. The floors were
designed to be resilient, absorb vibration, and resist moisture. An
ultra-modern cafeteria with a noise-absorbing ceiling was among other
attractive features.

Operation of the machinery was nearly automatic. At the push of
a button an overhead conveyor system picked up a huge half-ton
beam of rayon filament yarn, brought it to the proper machine, picked
up the empty beam, replaced it with the full one, and then rolled the
empty beam to the doorway where it could be loaded on a railroad
freight car. The filament yarn was pulled off the beam by ply-twisting
spindles. The resulting thread was respooled, twisted into high-tenacity
cord, and then woven into tire fabric. The conveyor system
finally picked up the huge roll of cord fabric and deposited it in the
storage area.[30]

This efficient process was especially valuable in wartime. With the
machines handling all the heavy work, women could do nine jobs
out of every ten in the manufacturing process and seven out of ten
in the plant as a whole. This made it much easier to recruit workers

Weaving tire cord fabric in the U. S. Rubber Company plant at
Scottsville.

in a man-short area. Starting with a skeleton staff, the plant had 136
employees in November, 1944, and by Christmas was over the 200-mark.
Employment, expected to reach a maximum of 300 in March,
1945, had actually climbed to 350 by the fall of that year. The
workers toiled around the clock on a three-shift basis, six days a week.
In fact, during the spring of 1945 they kept the spindles turning for
ninety days without a stop at the request of the War Department.
Fifteen per cent of the employees received citations for not missing
a day during the period.[31]

Transformed almost overnight from a rural village to an indus
trial town, Scottsville created a Town Planning Commission to ease
its growing pains. Since the company had imported very few workers,
the housing problem was not critical. Local employees, however,
came from such great distances that the commission decided to seek
low-cost housing facilities to enable them to move nearer their jobs.
The tax structure had to be revised to pay for new civic services, including
the expanded waterworks and a proposed municipal building.[32]

Then, six weeks after the Japanese surrender, came an announcement
that the Federal government was selling the factory. The Reconstruction
Finance Corporation listed the Scottsville plant with 949
other “surplus properties” to be put on the auction block and knocked
down to the highest bidder. The R. F. C. description read like a
barren obituary: completed in 1944 at a cost of $2,400,000, affording
a total floor area of 125,500 square feet, located on approximately
sixty-six and three-quarters acres.[33] Unlisted in the inventory was
the managerial enterprise which had made equipment designed to
produce 1,200,000 pounds of cord a month turn out almost 2,000,000
pounds every month.[34]

Accomplishments like this, however, had demonstrated the value
of the Scottsville plant and saved it from the premature death which
was the fate of many a war-born industry. No less than four large
corporations tried to acquire it, with the U. S. Rubber Company
carrying off the prize for $1,837,500.[35] Since the new owner was
already in charge of the factory, the change-over was made without
the loss of a minute's working time. Albemarle's war baby had
grown to manhood and was ready to stand on its own feet in the
competition of peacetime private enterprise.

Local corporations bethought themselves of postwar planning as
early as 1944. On September 1 a seven man planning commission
was appointed by Charlottesville's mayor, J. Emmett Gleason. The
county also named a commission, and on November 3 coordination
was achieved by the selection of a three-man steering committee. This
was composed of representatives of the city, county, and Central Virginia
planning commissions. Over 2,000 questionnaires were sent to
local servicemen throughout the world asking their civilian job-preferences

and qualifications. Other surveys undertaken in connection
with this program reported that seventeen manufacturers in the city
and county area were employing 1,936 workers in 1944, as compared
with 1,711 in 1940. These manufacturers estimated that they
would need 2,233 employees for postwar production. The indicated
increase of 300 persons in manufacturing was expected to create from
450 to 600 additional jobs in the service industries and construction
trades, promising that the Albemarle area would be busier than ever
in the postwar world. Further evidence of a bright business future
was found in increased bank clearings. The January-February, 1946,
volume of debits for Charlottesville was $48,022,000, which was
332 per cent higher than the 1939 average. Only seven other cities
in the United States had as great increases in clearings over prewar
days.[36]

Charlottesville and Albemarle County were primarily non-industrial,
having by far the greater part of their citizens engaged in business
and professional services and in agriculture. Yet, when called
upon to help supply the Army and the Navy, the community responded
in a manner which won the appreciation of the nation.
Justly proud of the fact that Southern Welding and Frank Ix and
Sons were two of the seventeen privately operated Virginia plants
which added three or more stars to their Army-Navy “E” burgees,
the whole people rejoiced in the knowledge that together employer
and employee had kept local industry in uninterrupted production
for victory.