100 years ago on July 18, 1918, the first story promoting the building of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State was the front page story in the Wenatchee Daily World.
It was 15 years later that President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the project in 1933 as one of the first great infrastructure projects of his administration.
When completed in January, 1942, standing 500 feet high and one mile across, it was then, and for decades to come, the largest man-made structure in human history.
Completed just one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into World War II, the massive output of electricity from the dam fueled the aluminum plants of the Northwest, the airplane manufacturing industry of Seattle and the ship building yards up and down the West Coast.
The irrigation provided by the dam created one of the nation’s great agricultural regions of eastern Washington State.
By Rufus WoodsPublisher
July 18, 2018
Here is my report on the Battle to Build Grand Coulee Dam:
The Fight to Build the Grand Coulee Dam and the Economic Revolution that Transformed the Nation
http://amatterofmind.org/ca-drought-pdf/Grand%20Coulee%20Dam%20Report.pdf
