Rosie The Riveter Has A National Park

The National Park Service has an Historical Park honoring Rosie the Riveter.  I'm going to do this in two parts.  This one shows a plant next to the museum.


It seems that today they use it for events.

 From Wikipedia:

"To ensure that America prepared for total war by mobilizing all the industrial might of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt banned the production of civilian automobiles during WWII. The Richmond Ford Assembly Plant switched to assembling jeeps and to putting the finishing touches on tanks, half-tracked armored personnel carriers, armored cars and other military vehicles destined for the Pacific Theater. By July 1942, military combat vehicles began flowing into the Richmond Ford plant to get final processing before being transported out the deep-water channel to the war zones. The "Richmond Tank Depot" (only one of three tank depots in the country) as the Ford plant was then called, helped keep American fighting men supplied with up-to-the-minute improvements in their battle equipment. Approximately 49,000 jeeps were assembled and 91,000 other military vehicles were processed here.
In mobilizing the wartime production effort to its full potential, Federal military authorities and private industry began to work closely together on a scale never seen before in American history. This laid the groundwork for what became known as the "military-industrial complex" during the Cold War years.^[2] This Assembly Plant was one cog in the mobilization of the "Arsenal of Democracy" and a historic part of what is today's industrial culture of the United States."

And here is a photo they had when it was being used to build tanks.











Next to it was the engine room that today has been converted into a restaurant.  I first looked in from the main room into the kitchen.

Then in the dining area, which wasn't open, but they let us in.

 

The museum was next door and I'll try to get some stuff up on that later.  It's actually a temporary exhibit until the new design is finished and the permanent exhibit goes in. 

Here's a followup post on some of the women who worked here.