History

The pile began on September 19, 1942, when the Naylor's Store Salvage for Victory Committee opened its collection point on the flat lot beside the rail siding. Over nine weeks Banister County delivered 61 tons of metal: bedsteads, wood stoves, a 1911 sawmill boiler, plow points, two disputed cannons of the courthouse-lawn variety, and household iron in quantities the committee's ledger records to the pound. The county exceeded its quota by 140 percent, third-best in the state, and was photographed for the Richmond papers. The pile was stacked, weighed, tagged, and left beside the siding to await the rail car that the regional salvage depot would, in the ordinary course of things, send.

The car did not come. Pickup was deferred in the spring of 1943 when the regional depot consolidated eastward, again that autumn when quota priorities shifted to rubber and fats, and twice in 1944 for reasons the correspondence describes only as 'routing.' The committee chairman wrote eleven letters, of which nine received replies and two received the same reply. When the war ended in August 1945 the pile stood as delivered, minus modest weather losses. The committee, chartered for the duration, dissolved on schedule that October; its final minutes thank the county for its generosity and adjourn, making no provision for the pile, which was not on the agenda.

Responsibility drifted until 1948, when the county's insurance review identified the pile as an attractive nuisance and the Board of Supervisors funded a fence — $410, four strands and a gate — around what the resolution calls 'the salvage, pending disposition.' Disposition arrived in 1953 in an unexpected form: the newly seated Banister County War Memorial Commission, surveying the county for a suitable monument, voted 6–1 to designate the pile itself, reasoning that 'the pile is the record of what this county was prepared to give.' An interpretive tablet was cast for $85 and the fence repainted silver. The dissenting commissioner favored a granite plinth, and said so annually until 1961.

Disposal has remained formally under assessment ever since. A scrap dealer's unsolicited offer was declined in 1961 on memorial grounds; a 1974 engineering survey found the pile stable and 'settling with dignity'; a 1989 environmental review concluded the oxidation was proceeding acceptably; and a $21,000 study commissioned in 2002 found removal feasible but 'not currently indicated.' The item has appeared under old business on the commission's agenda without interruption since 1953, a continuity the clerk maintains deliberately, and the fence is repainted every sixth year in the original silver, most recently in 2023, from a paint code on file since Eisenhower.

Local Legends

Families point out their donations from the fence line. The Tolliver bedstead is the most pointed-at object in the pile, although three different bedsteads have been identified as it, sometimes by the same family.

The bell of the old Naylor's Store Academy is believed to lie near the pile's center, and is said to have rung once, faintly, during the 1974 engineering survey. The engineers' report attributes the sound to their own equipment, which residents accept as the official version.

The pile is widely held to be lower than it once was, though the 1942 stake measurements and the 1974 survey disagree by only inches. Settling is the county's explanation; 'night borrowing' is the other one, attributed to no one in particular across eighty years.

The Controversy

When scrap steel prices spiked in 2008, the commission received three unsolicited bids for the pile, the highest at $9,800. The question of whether declining the bids required a public hearing — since accepting them certainly would have — divided the commission for five months. The county attorney's opinion held that a memorial cannot be sold without first ceasing to be a memorial, a two-step process no member moved to begin. The bids were returned with a form letter thanking the senders for their interest in the county's history.

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