​Abandoned Washington State

This is the companion web site for the book, Abandoned Washington State by Howard Frisk, published in 2023 by Fonthill Media, LLC and Arcadia Publishing. The book features photographs and the stories behind them for Washington States's abandoned farmhouses, one-room schoolhouses, ghost towns, hospitals, railroads, industrial and military complexes.
 
This web site serves two purposes:

For those of you who have purchased the book, this web site provides additional photographs and resources that were not included in the book.

​For those of you who have not purchased the book, this web site will give you a sampling of the photographs and stories to be found in the book.

 
​Eastern Washington State is home to hundreds of wheat farms, some of which have been in the family for generations. Many farmhouses that have been abandoned for decades remain in the fields as silent reminders of the original homesteaders that pioneered the area to make a living off the land.

Because they are a part of a family's history, famers often decide to let them remain standing.

 
​Did you know that the world’s first industrial scale nuclear reactor was built right here in eastern Washington?

It created the plutonium for the world’s first nuclear explosion as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. The plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was made here.

It has been abandoned for decades, but we were able to go inside and come face to face with the abandoned nuclear reactor.

 
​St. Ignatius Hospital was built in 1892 by the Sisters of Providence in the small farming town of Colfax. It was the largest building in eastern Washington when it was built and was Whitman County’s only hospital until 1964.

It later operated as an assisted living facility until 2000 when it was shut down.

It has been abandoned ever since and is reportedly haunted. We were given access to go inside and explore it.

 
In the early 1900's, logging was one of the main industries in Washington State. Where you had logging, you had railroads, and where you had railroads, you needed steam locomotives.

​Only a few survive to this day as rusted hulks of the powerful machines they once were.

This particular locomotive was built in 1898 and was used by a Canadian mining company to haul trainloads of coal. It did this for sixty-two years.

Photo credit: Kenji Shiroma

 
Did you know that the USS Plainview was once the pride of the US Navy and the world’s fastest and largest hydrofoil when it was built?

It was designed to out-run Soviet submarines by reaching speeds of up to 50 knots. The US Navy intended the USS Plainview to be a prototype for future hydrofoils, but it was the only one like it ever built. 

It now sits rotting away stuck in a mudflat on the Columbia River.

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These are only a few of the dozens of abandoned locations explored in the Abandoned Washington State book.
The book and this web site are organized into the seven sections as shown in the links below.
Let your exploration begin!