Willow Run: where Rosie the Riveter built a bomber an hour

When America needed a miracle in 1941, Ford built it on the soybean fields east of Ypsilanti. The Willow Run bomber plant — designed by Albert Kahn, stretching nearly a mile under one roof — applied auto-industry mass production to the B-24 Liberator, and by its wartime peak the line delivered a finished four-engine bomber roughly every hour, around the clock. Tens of thousands of workers poured in, including legions of women whose work here helped create an American icon: “Rosie the Riveter” was born of plants like this one, and Willow Run’s Rosies were the most famous of all.

The plant built transmissions for GM for half a century afterward, and when most of it finally came down in 2014, the community refused to lose the story: a preservation campaign saved a section of the original factory for the Yankee Air Museum, whose collection of flying warbirds and home-front exhibits now keeps the memory loud at Willow Run Airport, on the Ypsilanti Township–Van Buren Township line. For the townships around it, that’s the inheritance — when historians say American industry won the war, a fair share of the winning happened right here.