I was looking at the maps for the area around where I live and I found this.
It’s a place Google identifies as “Mock City”. It consists of slightly over a dozen almost-identical-looking houses connected by unpaved roads. It’s clearly uninhabited - there are no cars or outdoor decorations, though there’s evidence of tire tracks. There are power lines, but it’s hard to tell whether the houses are connected to them. The buildings don’t look especially dilapidated, but it’s hard to tell whether there’s glass in the windows and at least one appears to have its door hanging open. One building looks like it has a steeple. It appears to be connected by some unpaved roads to an unnamed farm road which does have light traffic and populated homes on it, and to the south there’s a place that looks like it was intended to be a river crossing, but no bridge.
I can’t seem to find anything about it on Google - all the results are just procedurally generated pages from various wikis and ad sites with no information about the history of the place or why it’s there. I wonder - when was it built? What was it built for? Why does it have a name if nobody lives there? Did anybody ever live there? Why no information about it?
I suppose I could try a little rural explanation and go there myself, but on the off-chance that it’s infested with dangerous animals or squatters I figured I’d try to poke around on here first. Anyone from WA ever heard of this place? Has anyone elsewhere heard of a similar place?
I can’t make heads or tails of topo maps, but if this image holds up to the topography of the place in question, I think we’ve found our winner. The image suggests it was a military training facility, perhaps for urban warfare training.
And indeed, Joint Base Lewis-McChord is 35miles away.
That’s the wrong place. This is in Pierce county, other side of the state.
Makes sense. I wonder why they’d build it off-base though when there’s so much space on the base itself.
If it was built for training, I wonder how long ago it was? I mean, most of the fighting the Army does these days isn’t in small villages with church steeples.
It has three obvious helicopter landing zones and both clear fields of fire (to the north) and good avenues of approach (from the east and west). Note the place for buses and heavy vehicles to park and turn around.
It is a training area, probably for the military or perhaps the police.
Definitely a military training area. Just to the northwest are open fields that are almost certainly firing ranges. If you head west, there’s a small bridge over the river and following that road further west leads to an actual road, where the intersection is signed “Caution: Military vehicle crossing ahead.”
That’s the perimeter of the base, yes. Mock City is south of that, though, which is the part that bewilders me. I can’t find any Street Views close to the place itself, so I can’t tell if it’s off-limits or not.
I did discover a field to the southeast with a bunch of porta-potties in it, which I guess could be for the trainees’ use.
The civilians were told to settle south of the Nisqually by The Hudson Bay company, and so they settled Yelm.
That seems to have held out until now hasn’t it ?
In 1986, a further expansion was initiated, and in 1992, the Army acquired additional land to enlarge YTC to 327,000 acres (1,320 km2). The Multi-Purpose Range Complex opened in 1989, and the Shoot House and Urban Assault Course opened in 2005. YTC has an AAFES shoppette, a recreation center and a gymnasium available to soldiers and their families. The Firing Point community club, with cafeteria, opened in February 2009.[1]
Seems going off maps is misleading, because in 1986 the base expanded.
Have a look at the roads, there’s no road into the “mock city” of Leschie Town ( the UAC ) without going through the old base lands… and the MPRC … and Yakima TC.