Site of Former Nike Missile Plant (Burlington, North Carolina) | military

USA / North Carolina / Graham / Burlington, North Carolina
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Nike Manufacturing Plant, Burlington NC

At this plant all battery and radar control trailers plus LOPAR, TTR, MTR, and TRR radars were built and tested prior to shipment to the Army, mostly by rail. During the peak of the Nike SAFEGUARD there were between 3 and 4,000 employees.

www.techbastard.com/missile/nike/factory.php

The plant is no longer owned by the government, it is used for storage as of 2011 by several local company's

There is a large fallout shelter under the northern most building.

Also

After the outbreak of WW2, the federal government took over the old Burlington Rayon Plant on North Church Street,and moved Fairchild Aircraft Company into it to begin production of a twin-engine training plane, the Fairchild AT-21 Gunner.
The factory was greatly enlarged to support its new role of aircraft production,and had a USAAF code of “FB” during WW2.
The factory was located directly across the street from Huffman Airport,which taken over in 1942 & renamed to Fairchild Field,displacing civilian aircraft operations to a location near Alamance.

Fairchild Field was improved with new hangars & a concrete runway,and was used to perform flight tests of the factory's new AT-21s.


The AT-21 had fairly unusual construction, being built from plastified wood. It looked rather like a small bomber, with a single machine gun in the glazed nose & a top turret with twin machine guns. The AT-21 was a specialized bomber crew trainer, intended to train crews in the use of power gun turrets or a gun on a flexible mount, as well as learn to function as a member of a crew.
The AT-21 had a brief production run & an extremely brief service life. The first AT-21 was completed at Burlington in 1943, but production ran for only one year, by which point the plant had turned out a total of 105 aircraft. Use of the AT-21 ended in 1944, when they were replaced by training examples of the actual aircraft in which the gunners would eventually serve.

After production of the AT-21 was completed, Fairchild vacated the facility, and the Firestone company moved in to produce guns as a part of the war effort.

The war years brought tremendous growth to the area. Many new people moved in to work at Fairchild and a completely new community went up on the side of the property where Eastlawn Elementary School & the City Schools Administration building are located today. A community of barracks-like buildings were constructed to house the workers at Fairchild and the area became Fairchild Heights.

After WW2 ended, the Western Electric Company took over the plant, which was still a government-owned facility. In the 1950s & 60s, Western Electric manufactured large portions of the Nike Ajax & Hercules surface-to-air missile system at the Burlington plant.

www.airfields-freeman.com/NC/Airfields_NC_Greensboro.ht...
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Coordinates:   36°5'52"N   79°24'28"W
This article was last modified 12 years ago