Arkansas Ordnance Plant
The Arkansas Ordnance Plant (AOP) is a Formerly Used Defense Site near Jacksonville, Arkansas. The plant was commissioned by the War Department on June 4, 1941, as an assembly facility for boosters, detonators, fuses and primers. Workers, mainly women, traveled to the plant from Little Rock in bus shuttles provided by Inter-City Transit and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Many families began moving into the adjacent Sunny Side Housing Project within a year or two. More than twelve thousand people worked at the plant during the height of World War II. The plant closed in 1946 and was put up for sale.
Six thousand acres of land formerly occupied by the plant became the Little Rock Air Force Base on August 1, 1955. The Jacksonville Museum of Military History occupies the ordnance plant's original administrative building.
