'Rosie the Riveter' Factory Faces Wrecking Ball

Campaigners in Michigan are battling to save a factory famous for being the workplace of the real-life Rosie the Riveter—and for rolling out 9,000 B-24 Liberator bombers during World War II. The Detroit-area Willow Run Bomber Plant is slated for demolition this fall, but donors hope to save part of it to become the new home of the nearby Yankee Air Museum, the AP reports. The group needs to raise another $3.5 million by Thursday to save the structure.

Rose Will Monroe, a riveter and one of the many women among the plant's 40,000-strong workforce during the war, starred as herself in a government film about women's contribution to the war effort. The plant, which was churning out a bomber an hour by 1944, "was the focal point of the entire arsenal of democracy,” says the Yankee Air Museum's founder. "Detroit won the war and we can’t let that story die." (More Rosie the Riveter stories.)