Igloo

The story

Igloo was a town the Army built. When the Black Hills Ordnance Depot was constructed in far southwestern South Dakota in 1942, its magazines — hundreds of low concrete 'igloos,' which gave the place its name — were so remote that the workers had to be housed on site. The result was a full company town of federal housing, a school, a gymnasium, a theater, and stores, with a population that reached about 4,200 by the summer of 1945. The depot stored conventional munitions and chemical weapons alike, women made up nearly half the workforce, and Italian prisoners of war were held there during the war.

Igloo lived and died by the depot. Through the peacetime 1950s it settled to around 1,800 people, but when the government closed the Black Hills Ordnance Depot in 1967, the town emptied almost at once — there was no other work and no other reason to be there.

What remains is a strange landscape: rows of the concrete storage igloos still march across the prairie, along with the shells of the town's buildings. Much of the old depot has since been bought up by a company selling the bunkers as private survival shelters.

What remains today

Hundreds of concrete storage igloos across the prairie and the gutted shells of the town's buildings; much of the depot is now privately owned.