The Marengo warehouse and distribution center is a subterranean storage facility located in Marengo,

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, located about 35 miles northwest of

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Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...

. It is one of the largest underground storage facilities in the United States. The complex is located underground in a former limestone quarry and comprises nearly 4 million square feet of space. The warehouse is used by the

US Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

for storage of approximately 10 million Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs); by

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for storage of 400,000 tires; and by Controlled Pharming Ventures for growing tomatoes and corn. The warehouse maintains a constant ambient temperature range of throughout the year.

History

The location of the warehouse in southern

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was first explored as a source of limestone on June 10, 1886, due in part its proximity to a railroad. Joseph Garrow first quarried rock from an open quarry at the site. The Garrow Brothers Company operated the Garrow Rock Quarry starting in 1887. In 1916, ownership of the quarry was ceded to David M. Seyton and Arthur B. Harris, investors who had financed the continued operation of the mine after the death of Joseph Garrow's brother, Milton. The quarry operated as an

open pit Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a borrow. This form of mining ...

quarry until 1936 when Rudy Messinger purchased it and renamed it High-Rock Mining Company. Underground mining began, using a

room and pillar Room and pillar or pillar and stall is a variant of breast stoping. It is a mining system in which the mined material is extracted across a horizontal plane, creating horizontal arrays of rooms and pillars. To do this, "rooms" of ore are dug out w ...

approach. In 1984 Marengo, LLC acquired the quarry and continued to mine limestone. Two years later, the quarry was first leased as a storage facility to the US federal government for grain storage. In 1995, the company began modernizing the quarry for use as warehouse space. By 2002, around 600,000 square feet were in use, and the facility employed around 40 people. In 2012, the US

Defense Logistics Agency The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is a combat support agency in the United States Department of Defense, United States Department of Defense (DoD), with more than 26,000 civilian and military personnel throughout the world. Located in 48 state ...

(DLA) award a contract for $563,711 to the Marengo warehouse for storage. As of 2013, twelve separate warehouse have been constructed in the quarry, totaling more than 1.3 million square feet. The company plans to complete an additional 16 warehouses, bringing the total storage capacity to more than 3 million square feet.

References

{{coord, 38, 22, 05, N, 86, 20, 26, W, region:US-IN_type:landmark, display=title Warehouses in the United States Quarries in the United States Subterranea (geography)

History

See also

References