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Cascade Arsenal is the abandoned military base at the foot of Blue Rock Mountain, north of the town — built for a war, sold for a pittance, and sealed after a scandal that made a fool of the government itself. It has stood locked and silent on the mountain for a quarter of a century.
When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, the Federal Government needed installations far from the coast, safe from any strike out of the Pacific. The Cascades were remote, the mountain terrain gave natural cover, and Lochdam already had the roads and the empty houses to spare. In 1942 two facilities opened: Cascade Arsenal at the foot of Blue Rock Mountain, and the Blue Rock Ammunition Plant down in the town. Trucks ran between them day and night, and at its height the work gave close to eight hundred people a wage. The plant made cartridges, grenades, and smaller explosives; the arsenal, up on the mountain, stored what the war had not yet spent.
After the war Cascade Arsenal carried on at a smaller scale. The Cold War still had its uses for a remote store in the mountains, and the trucks kept climbing the pass, though fewer than before. Then, in 1960, the Federal Government moved to consolidate its operations into fewer, larger bases. A place as small and as far away as Cascade Arsenal was among the first to go. Both the arsenal and the town's ammunition plant were shut the same year, and several thousand people lost their work. The base was sold for a small sum to a local man, Joseph Brewer, who let it stand untouched.
In 1964 the base returned to the news for the worst reason in its history. A chemist named Gilbert Moose had forged federal permits and brought five prisoners up from penitentiaries across the country, under the cover of a drug trial. When the deception came apart he fled before the police reached the mountain, and Brewer vanished with him. Two of those brought there were never accounted for. The story became national news — the government had been deceived on its own ground — and in a town already carrying enough, it settled into one more silence no one cared to break. For a while people feared that the missing had never left the valley at all.
The Federal Government sealed Cascade Arsenal after the scandal. By 1991 the buildings stand empty at the foot of Blue Rock Mountain, the Wolfback Pine grown tight against the fence, whole trees fallen across the wire with no one to clear them. On the slope to the west the rusted skeleton of an unfinished radio tower — begun by the army in 1953 and never completed — is still visible from parts of the town. The official story closed in 1964. What was actually done inside did not — and what still lies hidden there is sealed — pending release.
Lochdam Town · The Mirror · Vanguard Mine