Frank and Grace stayed in their home in the Cottage Grove Lake area until almost the last minute, not moving to Cottage Grove until August 1941. Grace said the huge lights, used by the engineers to light the dam construction areas at night, made the night almost as light as day. The rumble of the construction machinery went on twenty-four hours a day.
Marie Geer, 1999 interview

While Cottage Grove and Dorena dams were constructed, residents of the larger Cottage Grove area found their lives disrupted. The Army Corps of Engineers relocated homes, roads, and railroads to clear land for reservoirs. It was a period of loss and sadness but also excitement and hope for a future free from the dangers of flooding. Forty years after the completion of Dorena and Cottage Grove dams, many people in Cottage Grove praise the benefits derived from flood control. Residents now assume that the roads will be passable and that their lives will not be interrupted by the weather.

The dams have done some nice things. They took away a tremendous amount, but they did so much to save people’s homes from flooding.
Marie Geer, 1999 interview

I hate to think of what it would be like if we didn’t have the dams.
Evelynne Plueard, 1999 interview

The reason they have dams is to create reservoirs so that they can plant fish and so that they can have people out there water-skiing. . . . They can’t keep floods from happening. It might slow things down a bit but it has a bigger purpose: money.
Carol Logan, 2000 interview

I think generally speaking most of the people in the community realize you are here for the primary function of flood control and everything else is pretty much secondary. Certainly having a flood event in ’96, and it was a really big topic in the paper and the media for several days, made everybody acutely aware of the fact that the dams were preventing a lot of flooding in the vicinity. That helps us quite a bit, you know. If it had been fifty years since there’d been anything close to a flood, then the cultural memory would have been a bit dimmer.
Herschel Henderly, 1999 interview

They are just a way of life, now. We just couldn’t get along without them.
Isabelle Woolcott, 1999 interview

Next Page: The Flood of 1964