Some have called it the Manhattan Project of World War I – a mostly forgotten site in Willoughby that once housed a chemical plant.
“So, this is the only remaining structure from the Mousetrap," Mike Fricke said, pointing to a small, white water tower. "It’s in the pictures of the Mousetrap from 1918."
If you’ve ever driven east on Route 2 through Willoughby, you’ve likely seen the unassuming structure with DeMilta Iron and Metal painted in blue on the front. But in 1918, the facility, now a recycling center, was the central hub of the United States’ chemical weapons manufacturing, a site colloquially referred to as the Mousetrap.
“It was a big operation. They showed up in Cleveland in June, and they had it up and running in full production in November," Fricke, a member of the Akron chapter of the American Chemical Society, said. "And then the war ended, so they never used it.”
The U.S. was producing lewisite, an arsenic-based compound thought to be significantly more deadly than the mustard gas Germany was using during World War I. One article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1919 called lewisite, "the deadliest poison ever known."
"The problem with mustard gas is it's an area denial weapon, so once you spray it, no one can go there for months. It lingers. It floats on water," Fricke said. "The difference with lewisite is it's gone. It catches fire if you pour it into water."
In the summer of 1918, American soldiers took over the site of a former car factory in Willoughby to get started on mass production of the chemical agent, and the site picked up a nickname.
“The idea was that what went in never came out," Fricke said, "so they started calling it the Mousetrap.”
Soldiers were restricted from leaving the site, and information about what was being produced was scarce. Officials told residents that the factory was being used to produce a new kind of rubber for the war rather than the chemical weapon. But how did this massive wartime operation end up in Northeast Ohio?
“Keep in mind that Willoughby at the time had the world’s first industrial park, Nela Park, right? So, it was a center of industry," Reid Kirby, a military historian who studies chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare technologies, said.
Yet, the massive rush to produce lewisite in Willoughby came to a halt before the chemical was ever used. The war had ended.
“It’s kind of a question of how much lewisite they might have produced, what quality of it, and it’s really unknown if they actually even produced any," Kirby said. "Some rumors say they might have destroyed it on site, others that they dumped it in the Great Lakes.”
What actually happened to any lewisite that may have been produced in Willoughby is unclear. By November 1918, the plant was producing 10 tons of the chemical a day, Fricke said. He believes the theory that after the war, officials transported the chemical by train to the Atlantic Ocean.
“Nowadays, you couldn’t dispose of chemical warfare agents by throwing them in the water, but that’s exactly what we did," Fricke said. "We put them on a barge, took them about 50 miles off the shore and pushed them over."
After the war, other countries experimented with lewisite, and some companies even tried to find a commercial use for it, but after World War I, the U.S. never again considered it as a weapon.
The military left the plant in Willoughby, which was taken over by the Ohio Rubber Company in 1919, then DeMilta, and there’s nothing memorializing the project that laid the ground for the race to nuclear weapons during World War II, Kirby said.
“It really was, for the United States, it was the precursor to what happened in the second war with the Manhattan Project," he said. "The way the United States mobilized science and industry for war, this was the first time science and industry were mobilized.”
The Mousetrap was almost a test run for the Manhattan Project, Kirby said. Many know chemist James B. Conant for his oversight of the Manhattan Project, but he also worked on the development of lewisite during World War I.
"He was a chemical weapons pioneer," Fricke said. "Later he was a nuclear weapons pioneer and, some say, even the architect."
There are National Park sites marking three of the locations in the U.S. where the atomic bomb was created, Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, as well as a National Historic Landmark at the Trinity Site, where the U.S. first detonated a nuclear weapon in 1945. Fricke wants Willoughby to be remembered in the same way.
“And I really see Willoughby to Oak Ridge to Hanford to Los Alamos to Trinity to Hiroshima to Nagasaki," he said. "I see the path starting right here in Willoughby.”
Fricke has big dreams of opening a museum on the history of chemical warfare at the Mousetrap site. For now, he’s planning to push for a world peace monument during the local American Chemical Society meeting in October and continuing to educate people on the part Willoughby played in the path to the development of nuclear weapons.
