Ordnance, Oregon — The Ghost Town That Held America's Secrets

There is a ghost town just off this highway named, plainly and accurately, Ordnance. Construction began in January nineteen forty-one on the Umatilla Army Ordnance Depot, one thousand and one concrete igloo bunkers spread across nearly twenty thousand acres of high desert. At its wartime peak, the facility employed over two thousand workers and stored every type of munition in the American arsenal, from thirty-caliber small-arms rounds to two-ton blockbuster bombs.

A post office called Ordnance opened in nineteen forty-three. The community it served vanished within twenty years as peacetime budgets shrank the workforce. What remained was far more troubling.

Beginning in nineteen sixty-two, the depot quietly became a chemical weapons storage site, holding nerve agents VX and GB and mustard blister agent in over two hundred thousand munitions. Destruction of that stockpile, mandated by the Chemical Weapons Convention, was completed on October twenty-fifth, two thousand and eleven. The igloos are still there.