Before and after Bonneville Dam construction. Click on photos to enlarge.
Truly, in the construction of this dam we have had our eyes on the future of the Nation. Its cost will be returned to the people of the United States many times over in the improvement of navigation and transportation, the cheapening of electric power, and the distribution of this power to hundreds of small communities within a great radius. — Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 28, 1937, Bonneville Dam Dedication
Bonneville Dam was the first of 14 federally funded “big” dams on the Columbia River. The dam, which lies thirty miles east of Camas, was built between 1933 and 1937. It inundated the Cascades Rapids, a traditional Native American fishery. The Dam was promoted as a mechanism for improving river navigation and providing electrical power. Bonneville epitomized Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to embark on the “best kind of building — the building of great public projects for the benefit of the public and the definite object of building human happiness.”
Named for a failed 19th century fur trader and on-leave military man Captain Benjamin Bonneville, the dam was part of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration that provided jobs for victims of the 1930s Depression — emigrants from the Dust Bowl, poverty stricken eastern cities, and out-of-work loggers and agricultural workers.
Laborers worked around the clock in eight-hour shifts, pouring concrete and operating jackhammers in all kinds of weather. They blocked the river with cofferdams and poured enough concrete to fill a two-hundred mile long freight train.
It eventually cost $88.4 million to build the spillway dam on one side of Bradford Island, a powerhouse, and navigation locks on the other side of the island. The Bonneville Power Administration added a second powerhouse in the 1980s and dug a channel through Bradford Island.
Photo Archive: Bonneville Dam and the Cascade Locks
Speech: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Bonneville Address
1939 Brochure: “Fishways at Bonneville Dam”
Woody Guthrie sings about the Bonneville Dam in the
“Ballad of the Great Grand Coulee”
