Sign 4 - Employment Office and Dispensary

The employment office and dispensary was one of several support buildings that lined the east side of State Route 50. Immediately to the north was the US Army Office and to the south the telephone exchange and Administration buildings. The plainly-designed employment office was a U-shaped structure, built entirely of wood and one-story tall. It had 75-foot of frontage on Route 50 with two rear ells. The north ell extended 100 feet to the east while the south ell extended only 75 feet to the east. Eight-inch thick, 18-inch high foundation walls of poured concrete are all that remain today.

Employees here were responsible for hiring the men and women who would produce what was projected to be thousands of loaded shells daily. They also hired the people who worked in the warehouses, plant offices, restaurants, and cafeterias. Female applicants were processed in one ell, male applicants in the other, and all workers had to pass a thorough physical examination.

The dispensary, overseen by a surgeon and several assistants, was described in newspapers as being modern and well-equipped. It had X-ray machines, beds to handle workers involved in accidents, all necessary medical supplies, and even an ambulance if needed.

There were several construction-related injuries on the job site, none of them fatal. Through careful planning, the three shell-loading plants were accident-free, having no mishaps loading munitions and no cases of poisoning from handling the TNT explosives. The same could not be said for T.A. Gillespie’s loading plant near Perth Amboy in northern New Jersey. On October 4th 1918, an explosion in a mixing kettle sparked a 3-day fire that detonated 13 million pounds of loaded shells stockpiled around the plant. Over one thousand of the Gillespie workers were then sent to the Mays Landing facility to work since they were already trained to load the same three sizes of explosive shells.