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About Hermiston herald. (Hermiston, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (May 16, 2018)
WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2018 LOCAL HERMISTONHERALD.COM • A7 Ordnance buildings are gone, but memories linger By JADE MCDOWELL STAFF WRITER If you grew up on the intersection of Bomb Street and Grenade Avenue, you probably lived in Ordnance, Oregon. The Umatilla County community has mostly been reduced to a tangle of trees and crumbling concrete foundations on now-private property. But in the mid- dle of the twentieth cen- tury a few hundred peo- ple with connections to the Department of Defense used to live on a collection of streets across from the Umatilla Chemical Depot that included such names as Amatol, Bomb, Cartridge, Detonator, Explosive, Fuse and Grenade. An elementary school, small shopping cen- ter, post office, water tower and community building rounded out the town. For all the suggested vio- lence of its naming system, Ordnance was an idyllic place to spend a childhood, according to its former residents. “It was really a good place to grow up out there,” said Bill Linder, who now lives in Hermiston. Linder’s family lived in Ordnance while his father — like almost all parents in Ordnance — worked at the depot. They eventu- ally moved into Hermis- ton in 1955 after the DOD announced it was going to phase out the community, about a decade after the town was constructed. 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 stands behind what used to be a flat-roofed, one- story building that housed four apartments. “It’s sad to see it so dilap- idated now,” he said. “... We had a lot of good times out here.” Former Ordnance kids Linda (Johnson) Van- Blokland and Paula (Rus- sell) Simmons remember the same good times. Van- Blokland loved 10-cent movies in the community center, tree climbing (she had “the greatest tree in the whole town”) and getting pulled around on pieces of metal used at the depot to transport heavy bombs. “Our dads got into trouble for using the bomb sleds for kids at Lost Lake,” she said. Simmons remembers roller-skating around the smooth cement walkway in front of the collection of shops, neighborhood games like kick the can and acting in plays on the stage in the community building. Linder, Simmons and Johnson all remember the critters that came with the high-desert climate: Snakes and scorpions for catching, snowy owls that flew past the classroom windows and jack-rabbits for hunting. The fourplexes at Ord- nance had brick structures out front used for holding 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. STAFF PHOTO BY E.J. HARRIS The old townsite was purchased in the 1960s by Stafford Hansell and turned into a hog farm. “We thought we had everything, until we moved to town (in Hermiston),” Simmons said. In the mid-1950s, the government announced it would be phasing out Ord- nance and selling it, and 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 community for civilian workers on the Umatilla Army Depot until it was phased out by the Department of Defense beginning in 1955. coal, and some of the unused ones were commandeered for play forts. VanBlokland said she remembered some of the children climbed in a dark makeshift fort once, only to realize it was chock- full of crickets. “I don’t remember that,” Simmons said. “Oh you’re lucky,” Van- Blokland said with a shud- der. “I still think about that sometimes.” Linder remembers he and his friends using a particu- larly well-placed tree limb to climb on the roof of one of the buildings, and once a friend used a bow to shoot an arrow straight up in the air, only to have it come down point-first on his dad’s brand new car. Children in Ordnance went to school there through sixth grade, then got bused into Hermiston. Ron Furrer, who graduated from Herm- iston High School with many former Ordnance children, said he remembered Ord- nance was “pretty uptown for that day and age.” The shopping center included a beauty store, dime store and grocery store, while the community cen- ter featured everything from a playground to Sunday School classes. Residents could borrow lawn mowers and garden rakes, and sur- plus items from the depot like wooden ammunition boxes were re-purposed. McKay Creek Estates FREE Cognitive Screening Is Mom a little more forgetful lately? There are many early warning signs of a potential memory disorder, such as Alzheimer’s disease. That’s why we’re offering a FREE and CONFIDENTIAL cognitive screening. We encourage anyone who is concerned about cognitive decline to take this short, in-person screening. The screening is administered by a qualified health care professional. To schedule your cognitive screening today, please call (541) 704-7146. McKay Creek Estates 7607 Southgate Pl. Pendleton, OR 97807 PHOTO CONTRIBUTED BY BILL LINDER An old photo shows one of the housing units at Ordnance before it was reclaimed by nature. www.PrestigeCare.com families began leaving. Fur- rer said as the place emptied out the Army used to let peo- ple pay to knock down the wall between their apart- ment and the one next door to expand their living area. VanBlokland said her family was one of the last to leave in the early 1960s because her father did the maintenance for Ordnance. The property was sold to state legislator Staf- ford Hansell, who turned it into a hog farm. A 1964 article in the East Orego- nian described a “vast pork factory” with 1,300 sows housed inside 348 former apartments with new con- crete floors and pens around each fourplex building. An Associated Press story from around the same time said Hansell’s wife was irritated that the pigs got air-con- ditioning before their own home did. “It made me really sick driving by, seeing the pigs oinking around going in and out of the buildings where we lived,” Linder remembered. Craig Coleman of Ord- nance Brewing in Board- man has owned the land since 2005 and jokes he’s the “self-proclaimed mayor” of Ordnance now. He said he has put in work saving what parts of the history and infra- structure he can, but much of it had already been demol- ished or crumbled to pieces of its own accord before he purchased it. “We were able to save the old schoolhouse, and put it back to use, but everything else pretty much is too far gone,” he said. The schoolhouse is used for an agricultural chemical business housed on the prop- erty, and the one dwelling still in good repair is office space. The old commu- nity center, which Hansell used as a farrowing house, and a couple of other dwell- ings are still partially stand- ing, but most of the rest of the buildings have been reduced to rubble and bits of foundation. “I hate people seeing how horrible it is, because it was a really nice community,” VanBlokland said.
