Abandoned Military Installation in the Woods of East Texas

Today, we’re traveling deep into the thick forests of eastern Texas. We’re going to explore a place that you would expect to find in the distant future, perhaps on an extinct, forgotten, post-apocalyptic world. A place where humans are nothing but a faint, distant memory of the past- an afterthought; no more. We’re exploring an abandoned World War 2 Military Installation buried deep in the woods of East Texas. This facility is now known as the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant.

The Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant was a 21.36 square-mile government-owned, contractor-operated facility in Karnack, Texas, that was established in 1942. It all started when a young Congressman named Lyndon Baines Johnson (yes, future president Lyndon Johnson), saw the opportunity to persuade the Army to build one of the new ammunition plants in an isolated, rural area adjacent to his wife’s home town of Karnack, Texas.

LBJ moved quickly, and so did the Army, which acquired 8,493 acres of land adjacent to Caddo Lake, approximately four miles from the Louisiana-Texas border. In October of 1942, the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant was established to produce TNT.

With the exception of a 7 year period from 1945 to 1952, when it was maintained on stand-by status, the Longhorn plant then spent 55 years manufacturing a variety of munitions ranging from incendiary devices to Pershing rocket motors.

Stand-by status ended in 1952 when the plant was reactivated and operated by Universal Match Corporation. During the Korean War, Longhorn expanded its mission to include loading, assembling, and packing rocket motors and pyrotechnic ammunition.

The Thiokol Corporation, which operated a facility at Redstone Arsenal, received the contract to rehabilitate Longhorn’s World War II era liquid fuel facility into a solid fuel rocket motor plant. In 1955, Plant 3, which was operated by Thiokol Corporation, was designated to produce solid propellant rocket motors.

By its peak, the facility had grown to the size of a small city. It included 451 buildings, operated its own power and water treatment plants, and was interlaced with rails for the movement of raw materials and finished product.

Following the discovery of contamination at the site and the facility’s closure, the community set to work planning for the site’s reuse. Tenacious and enterprising organizations including the Caddo Lake Institute and Greater Caddo Lake Association of Texas worked tirelessly to engage federal agencies and the community to conserve habitat areas at the site. Thanks to their work and collaboration with the U.S. Army, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and other organizations, this site has now become a unique part of the country’s National Wildlife Refuge System.

Thus, some areas of the abandoned facility are now part of the Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge, and are available for hiking and exploring, with some restrictions. Other sections are still strictly off-limits.

The sheer amount of abandoned roads, structures, and objects that are still left here make it almost impossible for any one visitor to ever explore the whole site.

Still, it seems like this place is an amazingly well-kept secret, as we hardly saw a soul during the entire time that we explored miles of abandoned roads and structures in this abandoned installation, which, as mentioned earlier, is easily the size of a small city.

The silence was palpable, but refreshing at the same time. Truly, this is a place where you can step back, take a deep breath, and just get lost…. no pun intended. Thank you for watching; hope you enjoyed.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhorn_Army_Ammunition_Plant

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/aap-longhorn.htm

https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Caddo_Lake/about/amm_plant.html

https://caddolakeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/In-Depth-Case-Study-LHAAP-2018-Katie-Bird.pdf

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