The First Baptist Church of White Settlement is located on White Settlement Road in White Settlement Texas. White Settlement is one of the west suburbs of Fort Worth Texas. The town borders along the West side of what used to be Carswell Air Force Base. Carswell AFB was closed as a Strategic Air Command base in 1991. The base was redesignated the "Joint Reserve Base" a fews year later. The Lockheed/Martin plant (formerly known as General Dynamics) is also located immediately nearby. As a matter of fact if you ever see the movie Strategic Air Command, watch closely the first B-36 takeoff sequence. When the B-36 leaves the Carswell Air Force Base runway and the landing gear starts to go up, you can clearly see this church in the distance as the B-36's left landing gear passes in front of it.

This is the entrance door nearest to the inside basement stairway. The shelter sign is above this door, as you can see. There is no capacity listed on the sign, but a Fort Worth/Tarrant county shelter plan I have has the capacity of this shelter listed at 760 persons. The church is a fairly old structure that was built in the 40's.

Here is the basement of the church. Pretty much your average church assembly hall. The basement is very large in this building. The basement has a kitchen, classrooms, restrooms and offices in addition to the assembly hall. I didn't see any shelter signs inside marking the shelter area.

Here is the big surprise. During my conversation with the church maintenance man, who was a great help, I learned that there were still some of the original supplies around. The maintenance man told me that he moved these Sanitation Kits out of a closet under the stairs (standard shelter supply storage area) some time ago. I have been looking for a shelter with supplies since I started this museum and I finally found some. Although the supplies had been moved to an outside storage area at least they were still there.

The maintenance man showed me this curious item when I asked him if there where any medical kits ever stocked in the shelter. He said this trunk used to be full of medical supplies and that they emptied it out and were using it as a tool chest now. The trunk is far to large to be a common first aid kit. I guess that when the church was designated as a fallout shelter that some members took the time to put a large medical kit together. This trunk is not Office Of Civil Defense issue but it is about the same size as one of a OCD issue Medical Kit C.