KVIG Informative

Basic Magnesium Inc. built two company housing projects for the thousands of workers at its wartime magnesium plant in 1943 — one for white employees, one for Black employees. Eight decades later, Clark County’s own historical marker program is the clearest public account of what the Black project, Carver Park, looked like. No public record traces what became of it after the plant that built it shut down.

Basic Magnesium Incorporated formed in June 1941, a partnership of Basic Refractories Incorporated and Magnesium Elektron Limited, according to a University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives finding aid on the company’s records. Howard P. Eells Jr., who led Basic Refractories, held majority control of the new company and worked with C.J.P. Ball to establish it, the same finding aid states. Anaconda Copper Mining Company took control of Basic Magnesium that November, and the federal Defense Plant Corporation granted the company its construction contract, according to the same source.

The company built what Clark County’s Parks and Recreation Department describes as the world’s largest magnesium plant, powered by electricity from Hoover Dam, on what is now South Water Street in Henderson. The plant reached full capacity in June 1943 and employed roughly 14,000 workers before it shut down in November 1944, having produced about 166 million pounds of refined magnesium, according to Geoff Schumacher’s “Sun, Sin, and Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas,” cited in UNLV Special Collections material on the site.

Basic Magnesium planned two segregated housing projects north of the Las Vegas-Boulder Highway to house that workforce, according to the UNLV finding aid. Victory Village was built for white employees and their families. Carver Park was designated for Black employees and their families, most of whom had migrated from the South for the wartime jobs. Clark County’s Parks and Recreation Department states that architect Paul Revere Williams designed Carver Park in 1943, and that the project included 324 housing units, a community center and a school. A county interpretive sign on the site describes Carver Park as one of Southern Nevada’s first planned African American communities.

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The surviving photographic record of Carver Park, held in the Henderson Public Library Photograph Collection at UNLV Special Collections, dates the move-in of the project’s first families and the enrollment of the school’s first pupil to Oct. 13, 1943. A Federal Public Housing Authority house at Carver Park was photographed on Aug. 25, 1943, and a Carver Park daycare center was photographed on July 11, 1944, according to the same collection.

The plant’s wartime run was short. The federal War Assets Administration offered the Henderson complex for sale as surplus property in 1947, and the Nevada Legislature passed a bill allowing the state’s Colorado River Commission to buy it, according to the UNLV finding aid. In 1953, the Basic Townsite and the nearby town of Pittman were incorporated into the new city of Henderson, which seated its first city council on May 27 of that year and took its name from Charles Henderson, a former United States senator.

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Beyond that point, the trail documented in available archival and government records goes quiet. Neither the UNLV finding aid nor Clark County’s own account of the site says whether Carver Park was demolished, redeveloped or left standing after Basic Magnesium’s plant closed. The county’s own interpretive marker, installed under its America250 signal box historical marker program, is itself the most recent documented public act of preserving Carver Park’s memory — a two-sentence sign describing a 324-unit community that company records and photographs otherwise stopped tracking after 1944.

Eighty-three years after Basic Magnesium drew its housing map along racial lines, the fullest surviving record of one side of that line is a wartime photo collection and a county sign. The side built for white workers kept its name, Victory Village, in the city’s memory. The side built for Black workers has a marker — and an afterlife nobody has yet put on the public record.