Oregon is the state with more ghost towns than any other US state
A Ruin is not merely something which signals decay but it is also a certain imaginative perspectivism in its hopeful and tragic dimension.
The Ruin is a thing where what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.
Archaeology can make construction difficult --- a city in Greece struggles to build subway systems because they keep digging up ancient ruins.

A Ruin is a representation of what preceded it. The removal of ruins erases meaning and memory.
The Ruin is tantamount to sentiments, ideas or bonds that are no longer animated by the breath of life but which nevertheless persist shorn of any use or function relevant to thought and existence, but saturated with the past and redolent with a sense of the destruction of its reality wrought by the passage of time.