Austin, Oregon , Blue Mountains Supply Depot

Austin was never a mining town exactly , it was the town that kept the mining towns alive. Established in eighteen eighty-eight in the Blue Mountains of Grant County, it served as a supply depot and lumber source for the camps higher in the mountains: Susanville, Galena, Greenhorn, and the Bonanza Mine, all of which needed boards, food, and equipment hauled in by wagon. At its height, Austin's population reached somewhere between five hundred and several thousand, depending on the season and the state of nearby mines.

Its sawmills ran constantly. The Sumpter Valley Railway eventually connected the region to Baker City, shifting the logistics of the mining economy and gradually making Austin's role as an isolated depot less essential. Today it is a ghost town , a handful of structures, the remnants of a place that existed entirely in service of extraction happening somewhere else.