KVIG Informative

Henderson exists because the federal government needed magnesium for World War II ordnance and aircraft, and chose a stretch of desert near Hoover Dam to make it. More than eight decades later, the industrial complex that grew out of that wartime plant is still an active environmental cleanup site, with hundreds of thousands of pounds of contamination pulled out of the ground last year alone.

Basic Magnesium, Inc. was formed in June 1941 as a partnership between Basic Refractories of Cleveland, Ohio, and Magnesium Elektron Limited of England, drawing on mining claims in Nevada’s Gabbs Valley and proprietary electrolytic extraction technology, according to a Guide to the Basic Magnesium, Inc. Records and Photographs held by UNLV Special Collections. In August 1941, the federal Defense Plant Corporation awarded the company a manufacturing contract designated Plancor 201 to produce magnesium for wartime ordnance and aircraft, the finding aid says. The company selected roughly 18,400 acres southeast of Las Vegas for the plant, choosing the site for its proximity to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, which supplied the power and water the electrolytic process required, according to the same UNLV finding aid.

Construction of a workers’ community called the Basic Townsite began in February 1942, according to the City of Henderson’s own published history. Basic Magnesium built residential complexes including the 1,000-unit Basic Townsite, the 509-unit Victory Village and the segregated, 324-unit Carver Park, the latter designed by architect Paul Revere Williams, according to the UNLV finding aid. The plant reached the full capacity output the Defense Plant Corporation and federal government required by June 1943, the finding aid says, and operated for 804 days, producing approximately 166 million pounds of refined magnesium before a War Production Board curtailment order cut output by 40 percent in April 1944 and the plant shut down that November.

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A post office serving the site was named Henderson on Jan. 10, 1944, honoring former U.S. Sen. Charles B. Henderson, and the community formally transitioned from the Basic Townsite to Henderson, Nevada, that same day, according to the City of Henderson’s history. When the war ended and magnesium production stopped, roughly 14,000 Basic Magnesium employees left the area, the city’s history says. To keep the townsite from being auctioned off as surplus federal property, the Nevada Legislature authorized the Colorado River Commission of Nevada to purchase the industrial plants, and Gov. Vail Pittman signed that legislation on March 27, 1947, according to the same source.

Henderson was officially incorporated as a city on April 16, 1953, with a population of 7,410, according to the City of Henderson’s history. Voters elected Dr. Jim French as the city’s first mayor on May 23, 1953, the same source says. Portions of the original Basic Magnesium plant and land were subsequently leased to a series of chemical manufacturers, including the Kerr-McGee facility, which produced perchlorate from 1945 to 1998, and the Pacific Engineering and Production Company of Nevada facility, which produced perchlorate from 1958 to 1988, according to the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. That stretch of industrial land is known today as the Black Mountain Industrial Complex, a name describing its location rather than its wartime builder.

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Decades of chemical manufacturing on that land left perchlorate, chlorate, hexavalent chromium and chloroform contamination in the soil and groundwater, according to the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. The Nevada Environmental Response Trust was created in 2011 after a federal court approved the bankruptcy of Tronox Inc., transferring the former Tronox property — now called the NERT Site — into the trust for cleanup, according to the trust’s own 2025 fact sheet. Remediation at the complex has continued since 1987; the trust reports removing approximately 13.3 million pounds of perchlorate from the site to date, including about 199,000 pounds in 2025 alone, with a feasibility study on further cleanup expected in 2028.

Henderson has grown from the 7,410 residents counted at its 1953 incorporation into Nevada’s second-largest city, spanning more than 103 square miles and home to more than 359,000 people, according to the City of Henderson’s own history. The magnesium plant that gave the city its name and its first residents ran for 804 days before shutting down. The cleanup of the industrial ground it left behind has now continued for nearly four decades, with no closing date yet on the books.