The Kingsbury doubling, 1940–1950

THE HOME FRONT, AND THE CENSUS'S SHARPEST LINE

The town's one great growth was a war plant's overflow, in the next county: the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant, built from 1940 in La Porte County southwest of Walkerton, sought 10,000 workers — against the entire 1940 population of La Porte city, 16,000 — and loaded its first shells in August 1941. "During World War II Walkerton housed some of the workers for the nearby Kingsbury Ordnance Plant" (the plant's history, as carried in the town's reference record) — the closest established town to the plant gate, with rooms, houses and a railroad junction, took its share of a workforce that arrived faster than housing anywhere could be built for it. The census writes the size of the change on the town: 1,178 people in 1940 became 2,102 in 1950, a rise of 78.4 percent in one decade — the sharpest movement in Walkerton's whole series, sharper in proportion than the railroad foundings ever produced, because the town it struck was already built. The plant itself, its construction army and its postwar demobilization, belongs to La Porte County's ground and its builds; Walkerton's share is the housing and the permanent consequence — the town never again counted below two thousand. The home front at name strength — who came, where they lived, what the town built for them — is the Wars leg's record, pursued from the Independent's war years and the plant's housing files; the Story of Walkerton section carries the fact and the figure. What the doubling made was the modern town: the population plateau on which everything since has stood was set between 1940 and 1950, by an ammunition plant in another county and a war on two oceans.