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Lochdam Town is a near-abandoned former mining town in the Blue Rock valley of the Cascade Range, Washington State — roughly three hours east of Seattle and an hour north of Leavenworth. Founded in 1883 around a coal seam, it swelled into a mining and power town of more than twenty thousand people before a long decline left 786 residents by 1991. Its people drew together at the edge of the valley and sealed the emptied districts behind fences, until the grey, colourless ruins gave the town its name: the town without colours.
The Balder Coal Company opened the mine in 1883, and the first miners built their homes between the mine and the lake. The Thornwake River ran wide and dangerous, drowning seven men in its spring floods, and from those deaths grew the town's oldest legend, the Watermann. By the 1890s the settlement had been dismantled and moved to the safer side of the lake.
In 1903 the Pittsburgh steel man Edgar Camber arrived with plans to tame the river. The Camber Dam and its hydroelectric station were completed in 1907 — eighty metres high and four hundred metres above the town, set at the head of the Blue Rock Mountain chain. Lochdam became one of the first small towns in the Cascades with electric light in every home. In 1910 the place was christened Lochdam Town: loch for the lake, dam for the dam.
Coal and power flourished together. The Frederick West Town district was laid out in 1921, and by mid-decade eleven thousand people lived in the valley. Then came the stock market crash of 1929, and in 1936 a gallery collapse sealed nineteen men in the rock — their bodies never recovered, their names cut into a memorial stone. Thousands left, and the nickname the town without colours first took hold. The Second World War revived Lochdam: a mountain arsenal and an ammunition plant were built in 1942, and the empty houses filled again.
Veterans returned after the war, and in 1952 a technical college — Lochdam College of Mines and Engineering — opened its doors. Around 1960 the population crested above twenty thousand, and for a brief while Lochdam was counted among the proudest technical towns of the Pacific Northwest. The fall came just as steeply. The arsenal closed in 1960; the coal mine was shut after a federal inspection on 9 February 1970, costing three thousand jobs in a single day; the university closed in 1974; and a 1976 fire ended the dam for good. District by district the town was abandoned and fenced off, until the last five thousand gathered in the south by the lake to form New Lochdam Town. By 1991 only 786 remained — most of them working the C&M Milk dairy whose sweet, heavy scent fills the streets.
Lochdam lies in a steep valley in the Blue Rock country of the Cascade Range, hemmed in by forest and mountain. Blue Rock Mountain rises to the northwest; Camber Peak stands by the dam, and behind it the reservoir Alderdeep Water presses against the concrete. The Thornwake River, once wild, was narrowed to a few metres by the dam; the smaller Silverveil Creek runs down from the mountain.
At the valley's heart lies Lochdam Lake, once far larger. Decades of acid drainage from the mine left the water poisoned — fishing was forbidden in the 1920s, bathing in the 1930s — and its surface now lies unnaturally still, reflecting nothing but the sky. To either side stand the walled-off districts of Frederick West Town and Old Angus Town: more than six thousand derelict buildings behind high fences, with young trees pushing up through the porch floors.
For nearly a century Lochdam lived on coal, dug from 1883 until the mine's closure in 1970, and on the hydroelectric power of the Camber Dam from 1907 to 1976. The war years added munitions. Today a single employer keeps the town alive: C&M Milk, a dairy factory raised in the old ammunition plant by the returning industrialist Nicholas Crowe Meyer in the 1980s, working in concert with the farms at the edge of the valley.
Beyond the fences the wilderness has taken back much of what the town abandoned. Deer, elk, mountain goats, cougars, and bears move through the high forest of the Balder Wilds. Above it all wheel two hawks — one brown, one black — held by the townsfolk to be the very soul of the place. The old Wenatchi people said the hawks were older than the mountains themselves; the brown rules the day, and the black rules the night. Older still is the legend of the Watermann, said to rise from the water on the worst nights of rain — a story as old as the town's first drownings.
Caledonia Church — the oldest building in Lochdam and its spiritual heart, standing since the town's earliest years by the lake.
Camber Dam & Power Station — visible from almost anywhere in town, a pale wall of concrete high on the mountainside. The powerhouse, built into the dam itself, was gutted by fire in 1976 and now stands sealed behind an iron fence.
Camber House — a 1907 director's residence on Cinder Road, near the church. Long abandoned and slowly rotting in full view of the road, it is the town's most notorious haunted house, and passers-by say they cannot help glancing at its black windows.
Vanguard Mine — sealed in the mountain south of Lochdam, holding nineteen names in its walls.
Camber House · Vanguard Mine · The Mirror