Willow Run
Willow Run, also known as Air Force Plant 31, was a manufacturing complex in Michigan, United States, located between Ypsilanti Township and Belleville, built by the Ford Motor Company to manufacture aircraft, especially the Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. Construction of the Willow Run Bomber Plant began in 1940 and was completed in 1942.
Defense plant
The plant began production in summer 1941; the dedication plaque is dated June 16. The plant initially built components. The aircraft manufacturer Douglas Aircraft, and the B-24's designer, Consolidated Aircraft, assembled the finished airplane. Remote assembly proved problematic, however, and by October 1941 Ford received permission to produce complete Liberators. Willow Run's Liberator assembly line ran until May 1945, building almost half of all the Liberators produced.Statistics
- employees: 42,500
- military draft losses: each month 8,200 workers were drafted into military service
- training: the Aircraft Apprentice School had up to 8,000 students per week complete training and report for work
- size: 3.5-million-square-feet
- dimensions: More than 3,200 feet long and 1,279 feet across at its widest point
- building: Construction began on April 18, 1941
- aircraft: B-24 aircraft production began in the final weeks of 1942
- subassemblies: parts production and subassemblies were produced at almost 1,000 Ford factories and independent suppliers
Airport
Camp Willow Run
Willow Run takes its name from a small tributary of the Huron River that meandered through pastureland fields and woodland along the Wayne–Washtenaw county line until the late 1930s. By the mid-1920s, a local family operating as Quirk Farms had bought the land in Van Buren Township that became the airport. Quirk Farms was purchased by automobile pioneer Henry Ford in 1931. Ford, a keen exponent of the virtues of country living, used it as farmland for a "social engineering" experiment that brought inner-city boys to the Willow Run Camp to learn about farming, nature, and the rural way of life.The residents of the Willow Run Camp planted, tended, and harvested field crops and collected maple syrup, selling their products at the farm market on the property. In the process, the boys were to learn self-discipline and the values of hard work, and benefit from the fresh air of the country.
Camp Willow Run was for boys age 17–19, mostly sons of dead or disabled WWI vets and those helping to support their families. According to the Benson Ford Research Center, the camp offered:
Chapel of Martha and Mary
and Clara Bryant Ford dedicated a series of churches, the chapels of Martha and Mary as a perpetual tribute to their mothers, Mary Ford and Martha Bryant. The Fords built seven of these: The first at Greenfield Village, Michigan, was completed in 1929. The others, completed in the 1930s, were located in Dearborn, Michigan ; Sudbury, Massachusetts; two in Richmond Hill, Georgia ; Macon, Michigan; and Willow Run.The Willow Run Chapel was the one originally built for Camp Willow Run, and became the place of worship for the Belleville Presbyterian Church in 1979 after a series of handoffs. After the war, Ford sold the chapel to Kaiser-Frazer, who in turn sold it to General Motors as part of the purchase of the Willow Run bomber plant. GM used the building to store files until an undetermined time, where it was sold to the Cherry Hill Baptist Church. When Cherry Hill outgrew the little chapel and decided to build a new church, it sold the chapel to the Belleville Presbyterian Church for one dollar in July 1978.
The Willow Run chapel of Martha and Mary now stands a few miles from where it was originally constructed, on property that used to be owned by Henry Ford's Quirk Farms. Of the seven chapels, this is the only one currently in use as a regular place of worship. It still has the original pews and other furnishings; the only other set in active use belongs to the Greenfield Village chapel.
Factory construction
Like virtually all of the United States' industrial concerns, Ford Motor Company, by this time under the direction of Henry Ford's only son Edsel, directed its manufacturing output during World War II to Allied war production.In early 1941 the Federal government established the Liberator Production Pool Program to meet the projected demand for the B-24, and the Ford company joined the program shortly thereafter. Ford Motor would not only build the bombers, it would supply the airfield as well; the farm at Willow Run was an ideal location for the airfield's runways, being under the personal ownership of Henry Ford and sited between the main roads and rail lines connecting Detroit with Ann Arbor and points to the west. Easements were acquired from landowners across the county line in Ypsilanti Township where the Liberator plant would be built.
Although officially retired, Henry Ford still had a say in the company's affairs and refused government financing for Willow Run, preferring to have his company build the factory and sell it to the government, which would lease it back to the company for the duration of the war. Ford Motor was to have first option on the plant after war production ended, an option it ultimately chose not to exercise, although a rumor in Drew Pearson's syndicated column had Ford planning a postwar use as a tractor factory, but that never came to pass. Ford would eventually sell its land to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation's Defense Plant Corporation in July 1944, shortly after the Ford farms were transferred to the company's ownership.
Architect Albert Kahn designed the main structure of the Willow Run bomber plant, which had of factory space, and an aircraft assembly line over a mile long. It was thought to be the largest factory under one roof anywhere in the world. The Willow Run plant featured four large turntables two-thirds of the way along the assembly lines, allowing the B-24 production lines to make a 90° turn before continuing to final assembly. According to legend, this arrangement allowed the company to pay taxes on the entire plant to Washtenaw County, and avoid the higher taxes of Wayne County where the airfield is located; overhead views suggest that avoiding encroachment on the airfield's taxiways was also a motivation.
Employee housing crisis
Even with people driving 100 miles or renting every spare room between Ann Arbor and Grosse Pointe, the sheer size of Willow Run led inevitably to a housing shortage. Because of the urgent need for shelter, the Federal Public Housing Administration took action and built temporary housing.Willow Run Lodge and Village
The resulting housing complexes were built in several different groups. Willow Run Lodge was a series of dormitories for single people and was built on the land north of Michigan Avenue and south of Geddes Road. This covered 90 parcels of land totaling.In February 1943, the first dormitory opened, consisted of fifteen buildings containing 1,900 rooms, some single- and others double-occupancy, with room for 3,000 people. Between June and December 1943, construction was completed on temporary "flat-top" buildings providing homes for 2,500 families. This section was known as Willow Run Village. The flat-tops contained four, six, or eight apartments with one, two, or three bedrooms.
Also in the Willow Run Village were the West Court buildings, with peaked rooftops and space for couples or three adults. Of the 1,000 apartments in West Court, some had no bedrooms and were called "zero bedroom" apartments, and the rest had one bedroom. The first of these apartments were ready for occupancy in August 1943. Another large dormitory project, containing 1,960 rooms and known as West Lodge, was also ready for tenants at that time.
By the end of 1943 there were six different temporary projects in the vicinity of Willow Run: two dormitory projects, two trailer projects, and two projects with apartments for couples or families, West Court and the Village. Between them, there was a shelter for more than 15,000 people, roughly the number of people living in Ypsilanti at the time.
Parkridge Homes
In addition to the Willow Run Lodge and Village housing projects, another community named Parkridge Homes was also built in 1943 to house African-American Willow Run employees. Efforts to desegregate Willow Run Lodge and Village and build additional integrated housing were rebuffed by the Detroit Housing Commission and the National Housing Agency, so noted African-American architect Hilyard Robinson was contracted to design an 80-unit community. The housing complex remained in use until 2016 as public housing when it was demolished and rebuilt with new modern units. In May 2017, the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office recognized Parkridge Homes with the unveiling three historic markers signifying the importance to Ypsilanti history.Also constructed at this time was the Parkridge Community Center.