Just because I could
and because Bambi;s mom wasn’t in evidence. I wandered around taking pictures.
Kingsbury is an old military installation. They made ammunition there. Some places you can still see traces of the chemicals they used. The empty buildings are mute- but they tell some pretty interesting stories. Rest of the post below the fold so the page doesn’t take forever to load, lots of pictures.
THe first thing you notice afield at Kingsbury is the preponderance of bunkers. Here’s a picture of one
These are now overgrown with vegetation but once had neatly manicured lawns- top bottom and sides. They were landscaped so that they could not be seen from the air. It’s still difficult.
The front of the bunkers face west, I don’t know if there is any significance.Each had a single door, dock height so they could be filled and emptied from a panel truck. 
The inside of each bunker looks like a quonset hut- one made of concrete. They’re still in excellent repair, they were built to last. 
Blast doors which must have weighed around 1700 lbs still adorn most of the buildings. Huge hinges, my size twelve shown for scale, still carry the weight of those doors.
Still work as smoothly as if they’d just been hung.
Paint peeling off the doorframe reveals notes written in chalk by the builder, close to fifty years ago. Are his kids still alive? Will someone recognize the handwriting? 
The ceilings of these concrete bunkers sweat quite a bit, so they built gutters into the edges, whcih empty out drains on the front end.
These are the gutters- they’re about 4″ wide, and about 12″ deep on the door end.
They exit the wall through vertical drains
According to the game wardens, one of which lived close by during the war and remembered some details, these drains were also used to hose out the remains of those who were less than cautious in their ammunition making endeavors.
These days praying mantids guard the empty buildings.
There are thirty-odd of these bunkers, plus smaller ones which housed special manufacture and testing. Large warehouseing facilities as well. It’s now all part of an Indiana DNR property
Hundreds if not thousands of workers filed into these buildings every day. here’s a guard shack where people walked in; blacktop roads, still there, transported them from one area to another. Hulks of bluebird buses rusted in the weeds till they were sold as scrap years back. 
On the grounds there are cafeterias, stables, offices. Or rather the ruins of those things. The whole facility is returning to nature as quickly as nature can reclaim it. Some things like wooden stables perish quickly- others, like the concrete bunkers, or aging porcelean crappers
will have to wait a bit longer.
I like looking at thse things, remembering the country’s Greatest generation hard at work here, supplying our troops. WIshing for a return to that greatness.
My best friend’s mother worked at Kingsbury during the war. She was divorced–unusual in those days in our little town. Everyone then was patriotic. My friend and I formed a Secret Service Club, to watch for spies, etc. My mother remarked that Coleman was a German name, so friend and I lay on our bellies under Mrs. Coleman’s front porch trying to overhear spy stuff. All we heard were soap operas on the radio.
The text definitely adds to the pictures, although they are compelling on their own.
M
I can’t help thinking we’ll need those again one day…
Sandbag up the entryway and you’ve got a decent low-level fallout shelter. Reinforce the west wall with more sandbags and you’ve got something that could weather higher fallout levels.
I love walking through old stuff like that and listening to the whispers of the past.
Nice turn of phrase, Weet. Thanks!
My guess is the doors face west because that’s the least likely direction for any hostile aircraft to come from, and the doors are the least camouflaged part of the bunker.
(Both because they’re not landscaped, and because the sharp angles make for shadows… Though to minimise shadow, you’d want the flat plane to face south, I’d think.)