Trains still pass through Medora, where they once regularly stopped to take on tons of bricks manufactured at the brick plant, which stopped production in the early 1990s, about the same time the town’s biggest employer, a plastics plant on the other side of town, closed down. Staff photo by Bill Strother
The way into Medora from U.S. 50 passes by several neatly ordered rows of bright blue modules — storage units to fill with all the junk that’s forced your car out onto the driveway.
Behind the storage units lies an empty concrete slab, cracked and with a few weeds growing up here and there.
That was where the plastics plant, which once employed as many as 1,100 people, stood.
At the other end of town just a little beyond the town limits, a dozen huge kilns hulk close on the ground, their heavy, brick circular walls and domed roofs covered by vines and brush. The brick factory, the other large industrial activity in Medora, built in 1906, closed down in the early 1990s, about the same time or a little later than the plastics plant.
The brick factory employed only about 50 at its busiest, but in its time, produced vast numbers of bricks that were shipped all over the state and country, says Dennis Wayman, president of the State Bank of Medora, almost the only significant commercial enterprise that survives.
Medora, population 693 in the latest census, is not the bustling place it once was.
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