Camp Adair, Oregon’s second-largest city, built in six months

Bustling metropolis of 40,000 lasted just six years before being turned, by order of the U.S. Government, into a ghost town and cut up for salvage.

By Finn J.D. John — April 24, 2010

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In 1942, Oregon’s second-largest city sprang into being. In six months, a big patch of the mid-Willamette Valley became a massive Army training camp: Camp Adair.

Six years after that, Camp Adair was the state’s biggest salvage operation. And today, it’s the state’s biggest ghost town.

Here’s the story — the short version, anyway:

Getting ready for war

In about 1940, people in Washington, D.C., pretty much knew war was coming, and started looking around for a 65,000-acre piece of ground, mostly nice and flat but with some hilly, wooded terrain on it — a place that would seem like a little piece of Germany, where they expected to be doing the fighting. By 1941, it was down to two sites: one near Eugene and one just north of Corvallis.

R.I.P.: Town of Wells, Oregon

Business leaders in Corvallis and Monmouth, with an eye on the retail trade, actually visited Washington to lobby for the more northerly site. To the dismay of about 750 people living in the area around and in the tiny town of Wells, who were subsequently displaced by the base, they were successful. Many had to leave crops in the ground, and weren’t compensated for them — although the government did pay for their land.

But there were few complaints. After all, there was a war on. A few weeks later, Wells was razed and the area was, as they say today, shovel-ready.

A new building every 32 minutes

Then the crews moved in — four big construction companies that, during peacetime, were fierce regional competitors. During the construction season of 1942 — mid-spring to late fall — they built about 1,800 buildings. According to historian John H. Baker, these included “a field house with three full-size basketball courts, a bakery which had a capacity to produce 45,000 loaves of bread every day, a wastewater treatment plant, a fresh water treatment plant … a heating plant, 500 barracks, 11 chapels, five movie theaters, 13 post exchanges, two service clubs, a hospital … a bank, post office, phone exchange, warehouses, coal yards, headquarters building, a gas house, firing ranges, a (model) German village, electrical substation and service, airfield, day and orderly rooms, rail yards and the major improvements of Highway 99W.”

To do this, 8,000 people worked all summer. At their peak, they were finishing a building every 32 minutes. Electricians learned to wear stilts to save the time it usually took to move a ladder around. The hospital, Baker said, broke a national record for construction speed. And it was all done on time, and under budget.

By mid-September the instant city was ready to welcome its 40,000-odd inhabitants. This, at a time when Salem had just 31,000 residents and Eugene about 20,000. (Portland, at 305,000, was the runaway leader in population.)

Units trained at Adair for service in the war included the 91st Infantry “Powder River” division, the 70th Infantry “Trailblazers” division, the 104th Infantry “Timberwolf” division and the 96th Infantry “Deadeye” division.

After the war: Ghost town

The camp was decommissioned after the war, although little bits of it lingered on into the 1960s — including an array of anti-aircraft missiles installed in 1959. Buildings were dismantled in panels and trucked away, or floated across the Willamette River, to be used to build new homes; hundreds of these, characterized by sash windows of uniform size and two-inch-thick exterior walls, still shelter families all over the mid-valley (although many have been upgraded to give them better insulation).

Today: Birdwatching in the ruins

Today, the northeastern corner of Camp Adair is a wildlife refuge, the E.E. Wilson. It’s been restored to the seasonal wetland that it once was, so mosquitos are not unknown there, although — thanks to the plentiful bug-eating wildlife — not as common as you might expect. The long, straight, broad stretches of abandoned blacktop make for a pleasant bicycling spot, and the plentiful ruins and foundation walls are great for geocaching. It’s an especially rewarding place to visit with a copy of Baker’s book to use as a “ghost town guide.”

(By the way: A listener to the Offbeat Oregon History podcast who happens to be a geocaching enthusiast who works for outdoor equipment company Montem reached out to me to let me know his team just put together a comprehensive how-to and resources page on geocaching. Check it out at montemlife.com/ultimate-guide-to-geocaching/ ! )

Nearby, the city of Adair Village — incorporated in the 1970s on a corner of the old site — still has several of the original buildings, including the camp’s old fire station, which is now a restaurant.

(Sources: Baker, John H. Camp Adair. Newport, Ore.: John Baker, 2004; Benton County Historical Museum, ODFW Visitor’s Guide, www.cityofadairvillage.org; U.S. Census Bureau)

TAGS: #WW2 #USArmy #Wells #91stInfantry #70thInfantry #104thInfantry #96thInfantry #EEWilsonWildlifeRefuge #GhostTown #ArmyBase #TrainingCamp #AdairVillage #Salvage #Geocaching #SwampAdair #Lobbying #JohnBaker #Stilts #HenryKaiser

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Personal note:

I actually live in a house that was built, in the early 1950s, out of salvaged material from Camp Adair. Before we moved in, I gutted the old house and retro-fitted it with studwalls.

The construction technique was fascinating. Each panel was built by laying out tongue-and-groove 1x4 planks on a flat surface, probably a concrete floor, laying out an X-shaped pattern of bracing 1x4s on top of that, and nailing it together with ribbon nails. Then 3/8-inch sheetrock (Kaiser brand) was attached to that, and voila! Wallboard, studwall, sheathing and siding, all in one neat little two-inch-thick package!

Of course, the insulation value was very low, and the walls looked weird. The walls also carry the load of the roof, all by themselves — a system I've heard called "structural sheathing." And in our case, the weight of the whole house was transfered to the mud sill on the foundation by nothing more than a row of nails.

The floor wasn't a structural part of the house, either. In fact, I ripped the whole thing out, including beams and girders, and for a little while our home was nothing but a 60-year-old shell nailed to the mud sill of the foundation wall, with a dirt floor.

It wasn't pretty. But it worked. And it's a lot nicer now that I've fitted studwalls up behind the shell and insulated it all.

--Finn