Eleven thousand souls. Enjoying a natural gas boom these days, although the good kind, not the pick-up-the-pieces kind.

When your OUMB arrives in a flat-pack box and the instructions are in another language but you’re pretty sure you assembled it correctly:

Some lodges went all-out with the glorious abundance of ornamentation and iconography.

Some.

Looks redone. Queenswear?

China, I think. And the “Racket” was the name of a store.

Looks as if the townsfolk decided there was a benefit in redoing signs for defunct firms and brands.

Blyth and Fargo. Says this history page: “Blyth and Fargo operated a chain of department stores in Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, whose motto was ‘We sell everything but fresh meat and drugs.’ Ultimately, the store sold fresh meat.”

That’s fantastic:

Looks like 2/3rds of a movie theater.

Toothy-robot facade:

The sign’s repurposed. Or is it? The lower name is new, but the shape of that sign is not inconsistent with Chinese restaurants. The stylized lantern shape.

Well, I’d pay a dollar to know what the sign looked like long ago. Checked many postcards. No clue.

Ah: I think I found it. Maybe. Lines up with the location.

A great stripping down seems to have been visited on the town, you might think . . .

. . . but those patches of differently-hued brick look original, at least the ones on top. There's a darker border - and when you look a second time, you see a name of a store. Could've been a bay in the middle, but looks too close to the other windows. Probably also painted with a slogan, or advertising . . . what?

Right! That was easy.

That’s quite the facade.

A hotel, originally.

You can take the B out of the OUMB, but you can’t take the U out of the OUMB.

Ahhhh.

Every town needs one of these, if only to shame the lesser ones that followed.

Great old script. A holdover from a more cheerful era of signage.

It goes back a ways.

The marquee was bigger, before the fire.

I wonder how many people know its original function.

Gas station / garage, I do believe.

Painted, but still interesting:

The postcard says KASTOR

And there you are.

Its neighbor?

And there you go.

Waiting for a generous soul to return it to life. It’s not too far gone.

Should've stopped with the previous one, because I hate to leave on a bleak note . . .

. . . but that's a sad vew all around. The retail level looks original, but battered. Something happened to the second-story wall and the Hatten company was either gone or in no mood to pay for sign repair. The tree looks itchy.