World War II through Modern Era

With the onset of World War II, Union County’s industrial base attracted the attention of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Entering a unique partnership with Lion Oil, the Corps supplied $28 million for construction of the Ozark Ordnance Plant to produce ammonium nitrate. The private company oversaw the operation of the plant and acquired it for a fraction of the construction costs at the end of the war. In 1983, the enterprise became El Dorado Chemical, which continued to make explosives as well as fertilizer. World War II encouraged dramatic growth in manufacturing, and state lawmakers authorized local communities to provide financial incentives to attract industry. Union County established one of the first industrial development organizations, enticing Jess Merkle to build a large-scale poultry processing plant that became the largest employer in El Dorado. Beginning in 1965, Great Lakes Corporation processed the underground brine into a variety of brominated products, including flame retardants.

Despite the manufacturing expansion, the county’s population declined steadily after the war. Yet in the face of the loss of manufacturing jobs throughout the state in the 1990s, that sector held its own in the county. New glossy brochures and websites integrated tourism into the campaign to jolt the economy. These new advertisements highlighted the refurbishment in the 1990s of El Dorado’s downtown square into a historic district. Beginning early in the twentieth century, the Army Corps of Engineers built and maintained a lock and dam system designed to boost navigation on the Ouachita River. Although the shipped tonnage failed to match local economic boosters’s expectations, water-level management aided boating, hunting, and fishing. The navigation project sustained the Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge, the world’s largest green-tree reservoir. The pools at the dams on the river provided an alternative water source in the early twenty-first century to the underground Sparta Aquifer, depleted by decades of industrial consumption.

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