US Naval Ordnance Testing Facility Assembly Building

Built in 1946 on Topsail Island, North Carolina, the Assembly Building is a one-and-a-half-story concrete block and frame structure on a reinforced concrete deck set on pilings. Its specifications, prepared by the Kellex Corporation for the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, required an explosion-proof design with electrical fixtures to match. The building housed the assembly and storage of ramjet missiles used in Operation Bumblebee, a secret test program that ran from 1946 to 1948 under Navy direction with the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. Missiles were moved on rubber-wheeled dollies to a launch platform on the ocean front, where observers in a control tower and a series of eight observation towers recorded speed and distance. The project is regarded as a forerunner of later American missile work, and the building is one of the few surviving structures from this period. Its interior retains original metal conical lighting fixtures, and its attic holds numbered wooden trusses used for assembly. Later alterations include a wraparound porch and enclosed pavilion. The building has been in private ownership since the Navy left the island in 1948.