Ghost Towns: Times Beach, Missouri

Ghost Towns is a relatively popular category for the Rural Resurrection website. Our last posting in this category was on Gilman, Colorado. There’s an old saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is important to learn from these ghost towns to help us avoid our communities becoming one as well. However, some of the stories in this category are just interesting tales to read. This week we’ll take a look at Times Beach, Missouri.

Roughly 17 miles southwest of St. Louis lies one of America’s most infamous ghost towns: Times Beach, Missouri. Unlike many of the ghost towns, there aren’t many traces of what was. There are no vacant, derelict structures to take pictures of. There is no obvious sign of where a busy downtown once existed. The site where Times Beach once was is now a roadside park. But the story of the community is one worth sharing for other communities to learn from.

A Feldging Community

Founded in 1925, Times Beach was once one of the youngest cities in Missouri. People were originally drawn to this summer resort town due to the low cost of acquiring a lot. Through a deal with the St. Louis Times newspaper, residents could receive a 20×100-foot lot if they bought a six-month newspaper subscription. The offer drew working-class families in search of an affordable vacation spot along the Meramec River.

The community lacked paved roads, as well as many of the services and infrastructure of a typical city. However, residents had accepted the tradeoffs for this low-priced escape from the hustle and bustle of nearby St. Louis.

The Chemical Nightmare

Although unpaved roads have a low start-up cost, they can be a bit of a maintenance nightmare. Drier weather meant clouds of dust as people drove about the community. With increasing complaints, the town leaned on a contractor to oil the roads, a typical low-cost solution for many communities during the 1970s.

The town hired Russell Bliss, a waste oil hauler, to spray oil on the roads. Unbeknownst to the community, Bliss had been mixing waste oil with other waste byproducts from a chemical company. Unfortunately, this waste was contaminated with the toxic chemical dioxin, one of the primary chemicals in Agent Orange. Bliss had been using this mixture elsewhere, not knowing just how deadly it could be.

EPA Intervention

However, Bliss’ chemical concoction started catching up with him. A few indoor horse farms had hired Bliss to spray oil inside their arenas. People started getting sick, and horses started to die. These deaths and illnesses caught the eye of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but the results of their testing of the stables weren’t provided to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until the roads in Times Beach had been sprayed. By then, Bliss had sprayed approximately 160,000 gallons of waste oil on the roads in Times Beach over a period of four years.

Even after the CDC report, the EPA wasn’t heavily involved in the Missouri dioxin contamination until 1979, when they started investigating the chemical company. Yet, the spraying of dioxin-contaminated oil in Times Beach wasn’t addressed until the Environmental Defense Fund, a public interest group, published a leaked EPA document about the contamination. That’s when the residents of Times Beach first heard about the contamination.

In December 1982, while the EPA was still conducting tests, a massive flood submerged the town under water. Shortly after the floods, the EPA announced that Times Beach was too contaminated to inhabit. In 1983, the government offered a buyout to all 2,000 residents. It marked the first time an entire town in the U.S. was evacuated due to chemical contamination.

The Aftermath

By 1985, Times Beach was officially disincorporated, its residents had been displaced, and all of the buildings were demolished. The cleanup of the town site took over a decade to complete. An incinerator was erected on the site in 1995, and tons of contaminated soil and materials were burned as part of the cleanup process. Overall, the cleanup cost more than $200 million.

Today, the site of Times Beach is home to Route 66 State Park, a serene landscape of trails, meadows, and interpretive displays about the community’s tragic past. The park’s visitor center is located in the former Bridgehead Inn on the other side of the Meramec River, one of the few surviving structures from the original town.

Lessons Learned

The rise and fall of Times Beach stands as a case study in environmental negligence, government response, and resilience in the face of disaster. Although a nature park has taken its place, the scars in the land are obvious reminders of where a town once thrived.

Times Beach sought a cheap solution to a problem that was plaguing its residents, and it bit them in the end. The cheapest options are often, unfortunately, the ones with the least amount of oversight. Be careful in your own community with the decisions you make. The unintended consequences of picking the cheapest option can have disastrous impacts.

Have you visited Route 66 State Park or have you had memories of Times Beach before its evacuation? Share your story in the comments below.