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The plant was never Walkerton's, and this telling keeps it where it stood: on 13,454 acres of flat La Porte County farmland southeast of La Porte city, in the next county east — close enough to double Walkerton's population with its workers, far enough that its ground, its town and its name are its own. Kingsbury was one of 73 ammunition plants the War Department commissioned after France fell in 1940, sited here for the two things shell-loading wants: level land in quantity, and plentiful well water. The government bought the twenty square miles in 1940–41 and built one of the largest shell-loading plants in the country — lines that received empty shells and sent out loaded ones: shells, cartridges and mortar rounds, filled and fused in dispersed buildings spread across the acreage so that no single accident could take the whole works.
The scale of the labor is the plant's first fact. The War Department sought 10,000 workers against a La Porte city population of 16,000 in 1940 — and overshot its own ask: by May 1942 employment peaked at 20,785, about half of them women, drawn from every town within commuting reach, Walkerton's war housing among the overflow. The first shells were loaded in August 1941, and the plant ran its four war years without a major accident. Because the workers could not all live where they already lived, the government built them a town at the gates: Kingsford Heights, more than 2,600 dormitories, trailers and prefabricated houses, named Victory City first and renamed in 1942 — a federal instant town whose residents, after the war, bought the land out from under their houses and incorporated it as a town of their own.
The course after the war is a closing in two acts. The plant shut at the war's end, reopened in 1951 when Korea called the shell lines back, and ceased operations permanently in 1959. What stands on the ground now divides it three ways. The greater share is the Kingsbury State Fish and Wildlife Area: land deeded by the federal government to Indiana in 1965, 7,120 acres in the DNR's reckoning, of grassland, marsh, crop fields and a 30-acre lake, managed for hunting and fishing on ground the ordnance plant left fallow. A second share is the Kingsbury Industrial Park, whose redevelopment La Porte County's government took in hand in March 2017 — slow work, because the waste of an ammunition plant is expensive ground to clean. And across the whole reservation the war's furniture remains in place: scattered concrete igloos that stored the explosives, crumbling loading buildings, and buffer land that has gone back to birds.