Fifty hand-picked married men with at least one child Tennessee Eastman employees worked feverishly to develop the world’s most powerful explosive – RDX. The result was the large-scale production at Holston Defense (see The Secret History of RDX Colin F. Baxter, University Press of Kentucky 2018)
There is also a detailed history of this plant and the other plant at Horse Creek
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It’s actually 950 acres, according to current information. This is mid- to late-60s.
Tennessee acquired the land for the park in 1952. Fort Patrick Henry Lake was fully impounded in 1953.
Looking over old maps of this area, I found that Duck Island didn’t exist, as an island, before the impounding of the lake. It was just the eastern shore of the South Fork of the Holston River above Wexler Bend. And somewhere in there, it got ducks.
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 