“It was a beautiful place. And the odor smelled so good, so fresh. The hay would be fresh because there was no silt on it at all. It had a great feeling.”
Dal Hawkins speaking about river front meadows farmed in hay until the dam drowned the area, interviewed by Nancy Renk in 1996.
Dal and Teddie Hawkins cut wild hay on 76 acres of land they owned in the Pack River Flats. As with wild meadows all around the lake, the Hawkins field was flooded in the spring, growing up during the summer months to produce a bumper crop of hay by September. The government appraisers, however, looked at their field early in the season when it looked like a mud slough. “They appraised it at $15 an acre, $15 an acre,” remembered Dal, “so everyone else didn’t think that was fair enough so we had Bandelin, who was an attorney, and he got it up to $30, but he got half of the raise, so we got $22 out of it, see?” Nearly 400 other landowners protested the government appraisals, and local juries usually awarded them more than the Army Corps of Engineers had originally offered.
While the Hawkins tried to look at the benefits of the dam to the community as a whole, the loss of their hay meadows forced them to move from farming and logging seasonally into logging full time. Recalled Dal, “It changed our whole lives, see?”
Virginia Overland talks about the meadowlands that her in-laws lost.
