Dam repairs prompt look at long-gone town

By David Lester

Yakima Herald-Republic

KEECHELUS DAM – They’ve been gone now for 84 years.

The people – close to 700 at peak employment – hired to build this earthen dam, 12 miles west of Easton and in the shadow of the Cascade Crest, picked up stakes and moved on when the dam was completed in 1917.

Their construction town, erected a stone’s throw from the dam site, was dismantled. Most, if not all, of the buildings were burned to the ground.

“It was really a little town. It was the most modern town around in many ways,” said Mark DeLeon, archaeologist for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Columbia Area office in Yakima, referring to the camp’s electrical and drinking water systems. “It was there for four years and it was gone.”

The camp and its people are receiving renewed interest because the bureau plans to rebuild the deteriorating dam. Archaeologists have been combing through parts of the 100-acre camp, looking for clues to who these people were, how they lived, and where they came from.

Evidence critical to the search isn’t all in the ground. Some could be in the scrapbooks or the memories of descendants of dam workers. If so, DeLeon hopes those with links to the town’s past will share them.

The bureau, which owns the dam, wants to scrape off and replace the top half of the dam. The repair is prompted by the discovery of cavities inside the 128-foot-tall structure, created by the decay of construction trestle timbers left inside the dam.

Repairs will cost an estimated $32 million.

Keechelus, one of five reservoirs serving the Yakima Irrigation Project, is the only source of water for farmers in the 59,000-acre Kittitas Reclamation District. The lake can hold 157,800 acre-feet of water, more than 10 percent of the total storage in the basin.

DeLeon said the archaeological research is required because the repair work will damage the camp site, already eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. A nomination to add the camp site to the federal register is being pursued.

A team of archaeologists hired by the bureau ended a five-day excavation in various parts of the camp last week to complete an artifact search before half the site is dug up for use as fill dirt or trampled by heavy equipment.

The bureau is paying the firm, Archaeological Investigations Northwest Inc. of Portland, $125,000 to seek artifacts and write a report that draws some conclusions about the camp inhabitants. The report is due next spring.

Archaeological digs at several camp locations both this year and last year have unearthed some clues. Gold eyeglass frames, rivets from overalls, shirt buttons, a 1907 coin from either Sweden or Finland, broken medicine and liquor bottles, small cans of evaporated milk and tobacco tins, and remnants of lots of shoes.

The shoe leather was found in what construction maps identified as a shoe dump. Old shoes deemed beyond repair at the camp shoe repair shop probably were discarded in the dump.

Terry Ozbun, a senior archaeologist leading a six-member team from Archaeological Investigations Northwest, said Monday the team is looking for information about the social history of the camp.

There is much in the historical record about engineering and technology used in building the dam. Mechanical drawings and engineers’ notes, however, say little about the workers.

“But there’s not much on who was working here, what they did in their off time and what kind of social and economic status they enjoyed,” said Ozbun, as his crew sifted soil nearby.

Some artifacts do provide clues. The rivets and other metal fasteners can reveal the type of clothing the people wore.

The bases and tops of medicine and other glass bottles often contain a manufacturer’s mark, another clue about how workers lived.

Records that have survived along with some artifacts suggest at least part of the work force was of East European or Scandinavian origin. No evidence has been found of rice bowls or similar artifacts that might point to an Asian segment within the population, Ozbun said.

Officials hope a search of federal reclamation archives, housed in Denver, Colo., will provide full employment rosters and, perhaps, personnel records that would shed light on the workers. Federal agencies hold onto records for a number of years before those papers are transferred to a storage repository.

With that search still incomplete, the bureau is turning to the public for help, looking for descendants of dam workers.

“We are interested in getting information from the public with family diaries, letters or other correspondence,” Ozbun added. “Photographs or stories could be helpful.”

If such stories do exist, they would tell of a bustling encampment in its heyday. The Keechelus construction camp, erected in 1912-13 and operated for the next four years, had its own YMCA, store, hotel, school, hospital, mess hall, shoe repair shop and rows of housing for workers, both families and single men. There were houses and wood-floored tents for teamsters, laborers, mechanics, office staff, and cooks. Quarters also existed for what historical maps call “flunkeys,” those who handled serving and other chores in the kitchen.

The camp had its own running water, sewer system and electrical power, supplied by a small hydroelectric plant more than a mile upstream on Roaring Creek, a tributary to the lake.

A main street paralleled the dam on its downstream side. The camp straddled the Yakima River. On the river’s north side lay the main camp complex and most of the sleeping quarters.

On the south side were the shop and warehouse, the teamsters’ quarters and corrals for horses.

Family living quarters were set apart from the main camp and aren’t being excavated because the dam repair work won’t affect those two areas.

DeLeon said the bureau erected the camp and oversaw the construction, a departure from most other projects in which a main contractor normally handled all those details.

He said engineering documents suggest no company submitted what was considered a reasonable bid for the job, located in the high Cascade Mountains 60 miles east of Seattle and more than 80 miles from Yakima.

DeLeon said the bureau plans to create a repository, likely at the University of Oregon, where those artifacts will be kept. The university offers a degree program for museum curators and the collection will offer students some hands-on learning opportunities.

He said the agency also wants to create an interpretive center about the construction camp. A site has not been selected.

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