This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
I suppose it's too much to expect that the new millennium will at last see swords beaten into plowshares, but Savanna, Illinois, will at least see bombs turn into prairie flowers.
By the year 2001, the huge Savanna Army Depot—13,000 acres, including 13 miles of Mississippi riverfront—will close and be returned to Mother Nature. A good portion of it will reopen as restored Illinois prairie.
The Savanna Depot was born in 1917 when the Department of War bought the sandy farmland to test howitzers assembled at the Rock Island Arsenal. Following World War I, the depot just grew and grew until today the land is dotted with 437 igloos—earth covered storage magazines filled with bombs and other munitions. The depot is crisscrossed with 140 miles of roads, 68 miles of railroad tracks connecting offices, classrooms, barracks, ammunition factories, machine shops, and 156 huge brick ammunitions magazines. Savanna was better armed than most countries.
Environmentalists were ecstatic in 1995 when Congress voted to close the depot by 2001 and turn much of the land over to several conservation agencies such as the U. S. Fish and Wildlife service and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
It was these groups who discovered that Mother Nature had already been planning ahead. The bombs stored at the depot had kept humans at a distance—no farming, no housing developments. Just enough igloos full of bombs have blown up accidentally over the years to keep even foolhardy intruders away. As a result, there among the igloos and munitions magazines, Mother Nature had been having a field day. Much of the Depot land is as wild or wilder today than it was in 1917. Bald Eagles nest in the woods, the endangered Higgins Eye mussels are thriving in backwaters, and the prairie is safe from encroachments. There are plant communities at Savanna found nowhere else in Illinois. Among these are twenty-eight species of prairie flowers on Illinois' endangered or threatened list of plants which have been thriving under military protection.
Let's hope the conservation groups will be able to do as good a job as the Department of War has done.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
