South Dakota is full of dead and dying towns: the ones at the bottom of the giant reservoirs along the Missouri, the gold-rush shacks abandoned to tilt further down their crazy angles on the hillsides, the ones the railroad murdered by going somewhere else, the ones the Great Depression killed, the ones that the depopulation of the old buffalo commons is killing today.
Fall River County, where I am staying this month, seems particularly prone to the loss of towns. Ardmore is dead, Provo is comatose, and Edgemont doesn’t look too healthy. Hot Springs is doing all right, but, then, Hot Springs is on the edge of the Black Hills and gets a share of the tourist traffic. The rest of the county is not so lucky.
One of the oddest ghost towns in the Dakotas is Igloo, south of Hot Springs. Its death is less inexplicable than other towns’, if only because it was not a natural place to begin with. It was just a flat spot on the prairie, through which the railroad happened to pass, and during the Second World War, the Army decided to store munitions there for reshipping to the various places that needed the bombs and guns—which required inventory controllers, and safety inspectors, and clerks, and firemen, and then clerks to clerk the clerks, and pretty soon some schools, and before long there were a few thousand people living there. A hospital, a church, a post office, some shops: all in the bland, fast-construction style of the Army in the 1940s.
Through the 1950s, around seven hundred employees still worked at the site, but the depot was closed in 1967, and the town of Igloo was abandoned. The former residents maintain a website , and the land now belongs to the neighboring ranch. The owners of the ranch have apparently turned the schoolhouse into a bed-and-breakfast lodge , but when I drove down this weekend to look at the site, I didn’t see any guests.
Igloo, as I said, is different from other ghost towns—but it does have that sadness they all seem to have: a decaying marker of a human endeavor that failed.
Here’s Igloo as it was:
And here’s Igloo as it is:
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