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.
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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.