Willow Run: where Rosie the Riveter built bombers

Just east of the city of Ypsilanti, in Ypsilanti Township, stands one of the most important factories of World War II: the Willow Run bomber plant. When America entered the war, the Ford Motor Company built this enormous plant — designed by famed Detroit architect Albert Kahn and once called the largest factory under one roof in the world — to mass-produce the B-24 Liberator, a heavy bomber. The scale was staggering. At peak, a finished bomber rolled off the mile-long assembly line about once an hour, and by the end of the war Willow Run had built more than 8,600 B-24s — roughly half of all the B-24s made in the entire country. More than 40,000 people worked there, many of them women who took over jobs once reserved for men. One of them, a real riveter named Rose Will Monroe, was filmed for a wartime promotional movie and became a face of “Rosie the Riveter,” the iconic symbol of the women who powered America’s “Arsenal of Democracy.” So many workers poured in that the government threw up a whole new village of housing next door. After the war the plant was sold off — first to the automaker Kaiser-Frazer, then to General Motors, which built cars and transmissions there for decades. When the plant faced demolition, local aviation lovers fought to save a piece of it — and today part of the historic bomber plant area is home to an aviation museum.

You can see B-24 history, flyable warbirds, and a Rosie the Riveter exhibit at the Michigan Flight Museum (formerly the Yankee Air Museum), at Willow Run Airport, 47884 D Street, Belleville (miflightmuseum.org).