CAMDEN -- Over the years, workers from this city have made some of the most potent weapons in the world.
In World War II, they supplied the workforce for the world's largest rocket assembly unit.
During the Cold War, they manufactured a rocket system that could take on Soviet Union forces.
After Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, south Arkansas-made munitions pummeled Baghdad. Iraqis referred to them as "steel rain." When an Iraqi artillery battery opened fire, ordnance made in south Arkansas streaked across the sky to silence it.
For all of those years, Camden-area workers knew that U.S. troops were counting on them.
"Every place we worked made it clear what we did and for whom," said Teresa Harris, who worked for defense contractors in the area beginning when she graduated from high school in 1968. "We were making products that impacted soldiers' lives. That wasn't lost on us."
Residents hope the military will continue to rely on Camden.
The community, which continues to make missiles just east of town, is hoping it gets the chance to expand its military mission.
On Friday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a bill authorizing an $87.1 million bond issue for Lockheed Martin to bolster the company's bid for a U.S. Department of Defense contract. The company is seeking to build the military's joint light tactical vehicle, a new type of transport that will replace the Humvee.
If Lockheed Martin gets that contract, Highland Industrial Park -- roughly 8 miles northeast of Camden and 2 miles from East Camden, straddling the Calhoun and Ouachita county line -- stands to benefit in a big way, with jobs.
Officials say the Lockheed Martin contract would help preserve 556 existing jobs and create an additional 589 positions.
Looking for work
Separated by 50 miles from Interstate 30, Camden is the county seat of Ouachita County and the area's largest city. The town, population 11,674, has murals showing busy shops, crowded streets and billowing smokestacks, but that was in the past. On a recent Saturday, few people wandered through downtown.
The paychecks from making rockets and missiles supported the area for decades, but jobs are scarcer now. Businesses have closed. The population dropped 7.4 percent between 2000 and 2010. The county's unemployment rate was 7.6 percent in March, higher than the state average of 5.6 percent.
Median earnings per job, $27,794, trails the national figure of $33,419 and state's of $28,244.
The area lost 400 manufacturing jobs between 1998 and 2013, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
It would've been a lot worse without the war-related employment.
A military plant, residents say, could fire up the economy and get things growing again.
"Camden needs something," said Gary Williams, a lifelong resident. "Camden for the most part is dead."
Standing in a downtown park recently, Williams said his roots in the area go deep. During World War II, his grandmother worked in the area's defense plants.
He worked in one of the factories making rockets before taking a job with a timber company. And he is proud of the work he did to bolster the nation's defense.
"As far as the Lockheed Martin deal, I don't see how it could be a negative," Williams said.
Navy-built town
With America battling Nazis in Europe and Japanese forces in the Pacific, the U.S. government decided to build a large military arsenal in the heart of southern Arkansas: the Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot.
The military created East Camden as a planned community to support that nearby depot. It is the only city in Arkansas that was built by the Navy.
Years later, after the Navy pulled out, defense contractors moved in.
Companies located in the industrial park because it had manufacturing facilities and World War II bunkers for ordnance storage.
"There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bunkers that all you can see is just the concrete face," Williams said. "Everything else is underground, and that's where they stored all the bombs."
Although people refer to it as the Camden plant, if built, the new Lockheed Martin facility would be located in an unincorporated area of Calhoun County. According to U.S. census data, about 435 people are employed in private nonfarm work in the entire county.
For years, the paper industry was also a big part of the region's economy. But in 2001, International Paper Co., one of Camden's biggest employers, closed its plant there, eliminating 600 jobs.
The closure was the end of an era.
"Camden had always been a paper mill town," said Harris, now a board member at the Ouachita County Historical Society. "East Camden was the industrial complex for military munitions. They played a secondary role [until later years]."
In Ouachita and Calhoun counties, 3,000 people worked in manufacturing in 1998, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2013, the number was about 2,600. Over the same period, one-third of U.S. manufacturing jobs disappeared.
Hydra and Hellfire
In Highland Industrial Park, Lockheed Martin currently makes the PAC-3 missile, which was used during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 2003 invasion that became the Iraq War.
The plant also builds guided rockets, rocket launchers, long-range rockets and a defense system that can knock out missiles in space.
Lockheed Martin is not the only company with factories in the industrial park.
General Dynamics has a facility there that helps build the Hydra-70 2.75-inch rocket, often fired from helicopters to destroy materiel and personnel on the ground, the Hellfire air-to-surface missile, and the hand-held Javelin anti-tank missile.
Raytheon employs 85 people at the park who help make the SeaSparrow ship-launched missile, Tomahawk cruise missile and the guided Standard Missile, for use in the navies of the United States and 15 allied nations.
Aerojet Roketdyne, Rheinmetall Defense and Esterline also have facilities in the industrial park, along with several nondefense companies.
"Camden is holding its own thanks in large part to the defensive industries, Lockheed being a major part of that," said James Lee Silliman, executive director of the Camden Area Industrial Development Corp.
Though fewer than one-third of the jobs in Calhoun and Ouachita counties are in manufacturing, the industry makes up nearly half the area's payroll.
Still, since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the number of defense-related jobs has declined in the region That, combined with its declining population, has shrunk the workforce that's available to fill the jobs if Lockheed Martin gets the defense contract.
And even with the leg up from the state, new Lockheed Martin jobs aren't a given.
To receive the state's money, the company must first win the contract from the U.S. government. Lockheed Martin is competing with AM General of Indiana and Oshkosh Defense of Wisconsin for that contract to build joint light tactical vehicles. Those vehicles are designed to protect soldiers from roadside bombs better than Humvees do.
The Humvee is made by AM General.
Economic development officials expect a Defense Department decision in late July or early August, followed by a formal protest period for the contract-losing companies. At the earliest, production could start in the first half of next year.
Getting ready
In light of the Camden area's shrunken workforce, job-training programs are being planned.
The $87.1 million bond issue that the governor signed Friday includes a $1,645,000 grant for Southern Arkansas University-Tech to build a training center for workers so they would know how to build the new vehicles before setting foot on the factory floor.
"That would be its sole use," Corbett Lamkin, the school's chancellor, said of the training center. "Given the ramp-up in this project, we certainly have enough time to train a credible workforce."
Residents hope the possible new manufacturing jobs will spur a more vibrant downtown.
Lisa Ledlow, owner of AlmaLeigh's Antiques, said she has watched for years as downtown Camden emptied.
"Nobody shops anymore. They shop for necessities -- groceries, gas, clothes for their kids -- and that's pretty much it," she said.
"If they have that little bit extra, they'll shop and get what they want on Friday. If they have it -- that's the thing."
Most people drive to Hot Springs, Little Rock, Texarkana or Shreveport to shop, she said. There's not much to draw people to downtown Camden.
Ledlow said she is closing her store in July.
She said she might apply at the Lockheed Martin plant if it's built.
"I'll get a regular job, and that's just how it's got to be," she said.
Metro on 06/02/2015