Dant Oregon
By Steve Lent, Crook County Historian
Tucked into the rugged cliffs and winding canyons of the Deschutes River, the site known today as Dant, Oregon, is a quiet place with a rich and layered past. Once the scene of industrial ambition and fierce competition, Dant now lies behind a locked gate, its story half-lost to time—except to those curious enough to dig a little deeper.
The origins of Dant go back to the great railroad race of 1909. Two giants of the American West—the Oregon Trunk Railway and the Deschutes Railroad—set their sights on Central Oregon. Each company began laying tracks up opposite sides of the Deschutes River, carving routes into the steep, volcanic canyon walls. The Deschutes Railroad claimed the east bank, while the Oregon Trunk staked its path along the west. But when the Oregon Trunk hit the northern boundary of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, its progress stalled. Lacking a right-of-way through reservation land, the company had no choice but to compromise. A congressional injunction forced the rivals to share a single track between North Junction and South Junction.
A small depot was built at North Junction on the east bank of the river, while a siding station just across the river on the west was named Frieda. Though these stops may have seemed minor at the time, they would eventually set the stage for the brief rise of Dant.
Fast forward to 1945, when Dant and Russell, a lumber and mining company, saw potential in the rugged cliffs near Frieda. The company opened a perlite mine—perlite being a volcanic glass used in everything from construction materials to soil amendment—and named it the Lady Frances Mine. To support the operation, they built a mill and a manufacturing plant that produced acoustical tiles from the processed perlite. The location was remote and the terrain difficult, but with the nearby rail siding and a rough road crossing the river, the logistics were workable.
Access was anything but easy, though. Visitors arriving by road on the east side of the river had to cross the Deschutes by boat to reach the mine. The ore was hauled by truck to the rail siding, then shipped out by train to a processing site in St. Helens, Oregon. In June 1950, a post office was established at Frieda—but by December, it had a new name: Dant, in honor of Thomas Dant, the company president.
Though the mine showed promise, it had a short run. Dant and Russell halted operations in 1952, and while there were some brief attempts to revive mining afterward, the area soon fell quiet. The Dant post office was discontinued in 1954, and the industrial hum that had once echoed through the canyon faded away.
But the story didn’t end there. In the years that followed, a group known as the Deschutes Club acquired private land in the area. They transformed the rustic remnants of the mining operation into a secluded getaway. The old miner’s cabins became vacation retreats. Later, members began building homes on the east bank of the river as well. Today, access to Dant is tightly controlled. A locked gate guards the only road into the area, preserving the club’s privacy—and adding a layer of mystery to a place that once buzzed with locomotives and blasting drills.
Dant is no longer a bustling industrial site, nor a town in the traditional sense. Yet in its silence, it still tells the story of Oregon’s mid-century dreams—of railroads that opened up the frontier, of mineral wealth pulled from the cliffs, and of a little community carved out of stone and ambition.