LIFESTYLES
WEEKEND, MAY 12-13, 2018
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
A paved road leads down to the community center in the ghost town of Ordnance west of Hermiston. The town once served as a housing com-
munity for civilian workers on the Umatilla Army Depot until it was phased out by the Department of Defense beginning in 1955.
LOST CITY
Ordnance buildings are gone, but memories linger
By JADE MCDOWELL
East Oregonian
I
f you grew up on the intersection of Bomb Street and Grenade Avenue,
apartments.
you probably lived in Ordnance, Oregon.
“It’s sad to see it so dilapidated now,” he said. “... We had a lot of good times
The Umatilla County community has mostly been reduced to a tan-
out here.”
gle of trees and crumbling cement foundations on now-private property.
Former Ordnance kids Linda (Johnson) VanBlokland and Paula (Russell)
But in the middle of the twentieth cen-
Simmons remember the same good times.
tury a few hundred people with connections
VanBlokland loved 10-cent movies in the
to the Department of Defense used to live on
community center, tree climbing (she had
a collection of streets across from the Uma-
“the greatest tree in the whole town”) and get-
tilla Chemical Depot that included such
ting pulled around on pieces of metal used at
names as Amatol, Bomb, Cartridge, Deto-
the depot to transport heavy bombs.
nator, Explosive, Fuse and Grenade. An ele-
“Our dads got into trouble for using the
mentary school, small shopping center, post
bomb sleds for kids at Lost Lake,” she said.
office, water tower and community building
Simmons remembers roller-skating around
rounded out the town.
the smooth cement walkway in front of the
For all the suggested violence of its nam-
collection of shops, neighborhood games like
ing system, Ordnance was an idyllic place
kick the can and acting in plays on the stage in
to spend a childhood, according to its for-
the community building.
mer residents.
Linder, Simmons and Johnson all remem-
ber the critters that came with the high-des-
“It was really a good place to grow up
ert climate: Snakes and scorpions for catch-
out there,” said Bill Linder, who now lives
Photo contributed by Bill Linder
ing, snowy owls that flew past the classroom
in Hermiston.
A historical photo shows Ordnance as it was when
Linder’s family lived in Ordnance while employees of the Umatilla Chemical Depot lived there during windows and jack-rabbits for hunting.
The fourplexes at Ordnance had brick
his father — like almost all parents in thw the 1940s and 1950s.
structures out front used for holding coal,
town — worked at the depot. They eventually
and some of the unused ones were commandeered for play forts. VanBlokland
moved into Hermiston in 1955 after the DOD announced it was going to phase
said she remembered some of the children climbed in a dark makeshift fort
out the community, about a decade after the town was constructed.
once, only to realize it was chock-full of crickets.
Linder’s former home on Detonator Street is now a flat cement slab covered
by creeping grass and moss, but he could pick it out based on the tree that still
See ORDNANCE/4C
stands behind what used to be a flat-roofed, one-story building that housed four
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Bill Linder, former Ordnance resident, walks though the theater in the
community center building that still stands in the old town site.
A door in a frame stands in the foundation of an old residence at the
Ordnance ghost town site west of Hermiston.
Photo contributed by Bill Linder
An old photo shows one of the housing units at Ordnance before it was reclaimed by nature.