Why Illinois Abandoned This Entire City00:12:44

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Long before the Army arrived, Illinois was already building something remarkable along the upper Mississippi. Savanna had grown into one of the busiest freight junctions in the country rail lines running in every direction, switching 4,500 cars a day, a booming population, hotels, banks, and the infrastructure of a real city carved into the river bluffs. When the U.S. Army went looking for remote land with serious rail access to test and store weapons, Savanna was the only logical answer. What followed was the construction of a fully self-contained military city on top of what Illinois had already built: 7,000 workers, 140 miles of internal roads, 407 earth-covered bunkers, and the only facility in the country capable of producing a class of lightweight munitions later dropped on Tokyo.

For decades the depot operated at the most sensitive edge of American military logistics surviving two World Wars, a classified Cold War mission that remains restricted to this day, and a Gulf War activation that proved it still worked exactly as designed. Then precision-guided weapons changed everything. A facility built for volume became a liability almost overnight. We explore what remains of Illinois most secretive city the sealed bunkers, the crater from a 1948 explosion whose four-ton steel door was never found, and the 9,400 acres now home to 47 threatened species.

#ItsHistory #AbandonedHistory #IllinoisHistory

ITS HISTORY - Weekly Tales of American Urban Decay as presented by your host Ryan Socash.

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Scriptwriter - Ryan Socash
Editor - Karolina Szwata
Host - Ryan Socash


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