HIBERNATION

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, intended as a means to prevent another World War, halted most large-scale Navy ship production in the U.S....and the NOP ground to a halt. The thousands of jobs it had promised to the Kanawha Valley never appeared.

For seventeen years it languished in relative inactivity. The Great Depression wracked the nation's economy in the 1930s, and the Plant was able to provide only a little relief from the area's joblessness through projects for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and NYA (National Youth Administration).

But Franklin D. Roosevelt, now President of the United States, refused to sell the Plant he had helped build more than a decade before as Assistant Secretary of the Navy--he saw future need for the facility as trouble brewed in Europe and the Pacific...