In the early ’40s the federal government seized 19,000 acres of fertile land from the farmers of Illiopolis, Illinois, and turned it into a bomb manufacturing plant. Becky Bradway, writing in DoubleTake magazine, revisits the long-deserted Sangamon Ordnance and finds a seriously polluted river and a withered land that she describes as “property so lethal that the government banned its reclamation.”
