Photo: Dave Zahn/Statesman Journal
Most everyone in the West is completely over the moon at this winter’s plethora of precipitation that has brought much-needed relief to regions suffering from record droughts. Many lake and river levels were at all-time lows and fire danger was through the roof last summer.
But one interesting aspect of the lack of water over the last few years was incredible discoveries beneath those reservoirs where you like to go cliff jump with your friends or take a rip on the wakeboard behind the boat. Specifically, Western Oregon’s Detroit Reservoir, east of Salem, that was ravaged by the lack of water and at its lowest level in 46 years. Late this fall, a local sheriffs deputy discovered a well-preserved utility wagon that was manufactured at the Milburn Wagon Company in Ohio, one of the country’s premiere wagon manufacturers back in the day. The wagon was most likely used during the western migration. And that was just the beginning. The wagon was found next to an “octagonal” cement structure that was the remnants of a small town, Old Detroit. The town’s 200 residents were forced to abandon the settlement in 1953 after congress approved a nearby dam.
“I went on a treasure hunt down along the river, figuring I’d find foundations or something like that,” Dave Zahn, the local sheriff, told the Statesman Journal. “Then I saw a piece of old history.”
Old Detroit was a commuter town for workers laboring on the railroad at the foot of the Cascade Mountains.
The drought has uncovered plenty of treasures in the last few years: in Chiapas, Mexico a 450-year-old church, The Temple of Quechula, was discovered when a reservoir hit record lows. In 2011, in the midst of an Earth-cracking drought in Texas, four ghost towns were discovered beneath Lake Buchanan and this summer, a ghost town was discovered in Nevada’s Lake Mead after low water exposed the settlement.
Ironically, the dam that flooded Old Detroit was built to prevent flooding.
Here’s a few more ghost towns that died a slow, watery death.
