Dams and Hydraulic Engineering

Dams and Hydraulic Engineering. In colonial America, small streams powered rural grist mills and sawmills. In the early nineteenth century, entrepreneurs built factories powered by the flow of large rivers; the Lowell mills in Massachusetts, where capitalists diverted the Merrimack River to energize the textile looms, became a particularly famous example of this. Builders also erected dams to inundate rocky stretches of rivers and enhance the operation of canals. By mid‐century, the Army Corps of Engineers was actively removing “snags” and otherwise improving river navigability.

Urban growth prompted large‐scale dam construction. In 1887 San Francisco began receiving water from a dam 146 feet high; in the 1890s New York City began building a 297‐foot dam. In the West, privately financed canal and reservoir projects led the way in “reclaiming” and cultivating desert land through irrigation. In 1902 the U.S. Reclamation Service (later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation) started building large western dams. As hydroelectric power systems grew in the 1890s, corporations began transmitting electricity from remote waterpower sites to distant, urban “load centers.” Niagara Falls became the site of a renowned early hydroelectric power plant. By 1910 such systems were operating throughout America.

During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, plans for “conserving” water resources became a prominent component of Progressivism. Despite conflicts over the proper roles of government and private enterprise, Congress by the mid‐1920s had authorized the Corps of Engineers to devise multiple‐use strategies for developing America's rivers. “Multipurpose” planning garnered additional attention because of southern California's desire to dam the Colorado River for irrigation, power generation, and municipal water supply. In 1928 Congress authorized $177 million to build the 726‐foot‐high Boulder (later Hoover) Dam on the Colorado and to fund other improvements desired by California legislators. Catastrophic floods along the Mississippi River in 1927 also encouraged federal support for water projects.

Large dams constituted an important part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal; starting in 1933 with the Tennessee Valley Authority (a government agency that supplanted private electric companies), the Roosevelt administration championed water projects nationwide. These included the Bureau of Reclamation's Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State and the Corps of Engineers' Fort Peck Dam in Montana. During the 1940s and 1950s, dam building emerged as a staple of the national economy. Although sometimes decried as “pork‐barrel” waste, water projects proved politically effective in infusing federal funds into local economies.

By the 1960s, thousands of dams impounded rivers throughout America, prompting fears that too many wild rivers and fragile wetlands had been destroyed by reservoirs of limited social value. As early as 1909, naturalist John Muir had (unsuccessfully) opposed construction of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park. By the time environmentalism became a political force in the 1970s, dams were no longer considered an unalloyed public good. By the turn of the century, efforts to reduce water consumption were superseding interest in new water projects, and the demolition of dams to aid spawning fish was gaining support. Dams remained an important part of the American landscape, but little new construction was planned.
See also Canals and Waterways; Electrical Industry; Engineering; Factory System; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Louis C. Hunter , A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930: Water Power, 1979.
Donald C. Jackson , Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West, 1995.

Donald C. Jackson