As Richmond gears up to officially open Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front National Historical Park by celebrating its first Home Front Festival-by-the-Bay on September 28-30, 2007, it’s a good time to revisit the scope of extant places in Richmond that played critical roles in those years.

Click here for Mapping Richmond’s World War II Home Front, A Historical Report Prepared for the National Park Service (Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park) by Donna Graves in July 2004.

The following is from the study’s Introduction:

This study was designed to deepen understanding of the social landscape of the World War II home front in Richmond, California. Several of the most obvious structures associated with Richmond’s wartime past had been identified during preparation of the feasibility study to establish Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

Yet these places represent only a portion of the complex story Richmond has to tell about the changes that Americans and their communities went through during the war. The sites already included in the Park are concentrated on or near Richmond’s waterfront. While they capture a range of themes related to the industrial and social history of the time, Richmond’s urban landscape has traces and stories to tell of an even more rich and diverse portrait of home front America. The results of this research provide an overview of home front Richmond that can inform interpretative efforts for the National Historical Park, preservation activities by the City of Richmond, and further research on the history of Richmond during WWII.

The authorizing legislation for Rosie the Riveter/WWII National Historical Park specifically states that the “general management plan shall include a determination of whether there are additional representative sites in Richmond that should be added to the park or sites in the rest of the United States that relate to the industrial, governmental, and citizen efforts during World War II that should be linked to and interpreted at the park.”

This study provides a preliminary compilation of additional information on sites and structures relevant to the story of Richmond’s home front years. It was intended to aid the National Park Service and others in developing a more comprehensive picture of how Richmond was transformed by the efforts of federal, county and city governments; the Kaiser Shipyards and other defense industries; war-specific organizations including civil defense and ration programs; war-related activities of national and local organizations, such as the Red Cross and USO, the Elks Club and the NAACP; and other social changes related to the home front, such as the internment or displacement of “enemy aliens.”

Richmond was a small city at the beginning of the war, with only 23,000 people spread over a landscape that was largely semi-rural, though dotted with major industries such as Standard Oil, the Ford Assembly Building, American Radiator and Standard, and the Pullman factory. Macdonald Avenue was already a vital commercial thread that wove through much of the community, yet older Richmond residents’ memories are filled with stories about the farm animals they and their neighbors kept for sustenance and income. Many residents of pre-war Richmond have fond memories of a place where city life and farm life were knit together.

Patterns of life, work and land use were utterly transformed during the war. Recruitment of workers for the four Kaiser shipyards brought the city’s population to over 100,00, and changed the city’s ethnic composition, increasing the African American community by a factor of ten, and bringing greater numbers of Latinos and Chinese Americans who lived in, or simply commuted to, new defense jobs within Richmond. As the city’s population quadrupled in the opening years of WWII, much of Richmond was built out, and many neighborhoods are filled today with the same buildings that wartime workers would have lived among and moved through.

Given the breadth of potential topics associated with the story of Richmond during WWII, and the quantity of structures that date to the period, description of the methods used for this study and the areas of focus are in order. The sites selected for initial inclusion in the Park -- Shipyard Three, Maritime and Powers Child Development Centers, Ford Assembly Building, Kaiser Field Hospital, Atchison Village and Fire Station 67A – touch on a number of important home front themes including advances in the availability of childcare and health care, defense industries and their workforce, housing and public safety. These sites allow us to begin to understand the impacts of war upon large industries and local government, and their responses to wartime change. They also provide insights into the experiences of defense workers who had access to housing at Atchison Village and daycare at these child development centers, although a limited view given that these sites reportedly served only white workers.

This study aims to broaden the current base of information about Richmond during WWII to include locations and themes that lie outside those already designated. Alongside the themes exemplified by the historic sites listed above, this study has sought out places in Richmond that can help us understand:

• the range of local defense industries, including pre-war businesses that converted to defense production efforts by municipal government to address the needs on an expanding population
• civil defense and rationing programs
• community organizations that rallied to the war effort
• organizations that served newcomers
• civil rights groups and ethnic-specific organizations
• expansion of local schools
• businesses that supplied goods and services for Richmond’s expanding economic base patterns of private and public housing for defense workers recreation and entertainment

In addition to these themes, which expand the range of information for Park planning and interpretation, the study sought to locate sites beyond the waterfront that acknowledge the presence of Richmond’s home front legacy across the city’s many neighborhoods. Thoroughfares that promise to be major paths of travel for future visitors to the Park received special emphasis, including Harbour Way, Marina Way, 23^rd Street/Marina Bay Parkway, Cutting Boulevard and Macdonald Avenue.

Several local archives yielded rich material, however the collections of the Richmond Public Library and the Richmond Museum of History were identified from the outset as key to beginning to piece together the details of life in this city on the home front. I combed through the collections of both institutions over many months and found a wealth of information that has shaped this study. Yet many gaps in the record became apparent. The holdings of both the Museum and Library tend to favor published accounts of events during the period, and while the newsletters and annual reports of the Chamber of Commerce proved invaluable for their detail about local businesses and their wartime efforts, these are, by their very nature, filtered through the “booster” lens of the organization and the class and ethnic make-up of its members.

Although some correspondence in organizational files was available and useful, letters, diaries and other personal accounts of the time were rarely found in the Richmond Museum of History or the Library. This underscores the value of the oral histories gathered to date, and the larger collection of individual narratives For example, African American or Latino-owned businesses and civic groups rarely appear in these publications, nor are they adequately represented in the Richmond City Directory. Published reports are also, obviously, tailored and edited accounts that may mask failures, debates, or schisms within the community that the authors wish to keep out of the public record.

Despite these archival biases, which are common to many institutional collections, the archives of the Library and Museum, and their generous staff, have been invaluable for accomplishing what this study set out to do – to begin to draw the contours of a “portrait” of home front Richmond that might provide the groundwork for interpretive planning. The shading and coloration that others will add to this sketch can only enrich its depiction of Richmond during the WWII years.