WWII U.S. Army Trunk Locker

The Story

A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, the Army was already packing. This trunk locker was built under a tentative specification of June 12, 1940 — the Protective Mobilization Plan buildup — by the United States Trunk Co. of Fall River, Massachusetts, on a Chicago Quartermaster Depot contract dated July 18, 1940, and the brass plate on its face records all of it. Early-war lockers like this one came from civilian trunk makers, canvas over wood with black steel banding and a Corbin lock, and they show it: this is a nicer-built box than the stenciled plywood footlockers that followed once the war was on. Solid and complete, honest wear, no key, no tray — a piece of the mobilization you can stack quilts in.

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