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Post by whollygoats on Feb 18, 2018 19:36:51 GMT
My Home Town was Ordnance, Oregon, in the western reaches of North America, on the arid high plateau of the Columbia River Basin. It is now a 'ghost town'. Nobody lives there. No business is transacted. The structures, but for one have all fallen in to ruin and the remaining one is part of a corporate agribusiness interest. The town disappeared years ago. When I was still a child, actually. We moved away to follow better opportunities in northern Idaho, and then, after that project, on to the big city of Portland, where I would grow up and live the greatest portion of my life. Ordnance was a US Department of Defense housing project, built to accommodate workers at the US Army Ordnance Depot north across Highway 30, in the desert five miles northwest of Hermiston. It was pretty basic tilt-up poured concrete walls on concrete slabs in a barracks style with which the US Army is so proficient. There was a 'shopping center' on the highway. It hosted a gasoline service station, a market, a barber shop, and a large indoor concrete slab that could be used for multiple purposes and was a great roller skating rink. The school was on the east end of town, near the community center, at the end of Fuse Street. We lived on Bomb Street, near the south edge of town. To the corner and cross Grenade Street, and you were in tumbleweeds and sage brush. pnwphotoblog.com/ghost-town-of-ordnance-oregon/
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Post by Mari on Feb 18, 2018 19:39:09 GMT
Aside from the buildings, it sounds like they were very inventive with the streetnames as well...
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Post by Kye on Feb 18, 2018 20:27:37 GMT
Bomb street...
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 19, 2018 0:43:28 GMT
Yes. And we lived very near its intersection with Grenade Street.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 19, 2018 1:36:38 GMT
I was amused to find that at the end of Fuse Street was the school.
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Post by JoeP on Feb 19, 2018 8:12:04 GMT
Was it a short street?
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Post by Kye on Feb 19, 2018 13:39:10 GMT
...Joe does it again --made me snort my coffee...
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 19, 2018 13:39:13 GMT
Yes. You can see on the map at the link.
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Post by tangent on Feb 19, 2018 13:40:41 GMT
Too much for a Monday morning.
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Post by Mari on Feb 19, 2018 17:45:49 GMT
Some people have a very short fuse...
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 20, 2018 3:36:20 GMT
Fuse was all too short every Monday morning would be my guess.
I never got to test it, as we left when I was three.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 25, 2018 6:30:03 GMT
I think I've alluded to its subsequent illustrious history?
As noted, we left when I was three, which would have placed it in 1956-57. By 1960, the town had been abandoned in favor of nearby Hermiston, a town with real amenities, thanks to the ready availability of automotive transport. It was, after all, the great 'freeway' building era in America and the US highway, US 30, would be transformed in to Interstate 84 and no stop at Ordnance. Folks had cars and could commute. The Department of Defense sold the town, lock, stock, and barrel...to a local agri-businessman. He surrounded the entire town with cyclone fencing, tore all the doors off of all the living units, and installed troughs in every front yard and stocked it with pigs. Being as it was right on the new Interstate freeway, it became notorious. Folks almost always engaged in a futile effort to roll up their windows and shut out the stench as they drove past my home town, a pig farm.
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Post by JoeP on Feb 25, 2018 10:24:11 GMT
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