The Promised Industrial Metropolis
A massive 100-million-dollar hydroelectric and industrial project proposed for the Columbia River promises to transform the region into a global manufacturing hub.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Following the announcement that interests represented by the General Electric Company of Schenectady, N.Y., intend to harness Priest Rapids on the Columbia River at a cost of nearly $90,000,000 and establish there one of the greatest industrial cities in the United States, electrical engineers suggest the project marks a new industrial era in the Pacific Northwest. The company has purchased nearly 6,000 acres and intends to build an industrial city with a payroll of at least 15,000 workers and a population of 50,000. The Priest Rapids power plant will be the largest hydro-electric development in the United States outside of Niagara Falls, utilizing a two-mile-long dam. Incidental to the power development, the plan provides for the reclamation of 100,000 acres of the Columbia Basin, offering a hinterland of productive farmland for the new city.
“Commencement of the work would mark a new industrial era in the Pacific Northwest.”
This 1923 vision for a massive industrial city and hydro-electric plant at Priest Rapids highlights the era's relentless boosterism and belief in total landscape transformation. Today, this land is the site of the Hanford Site, which remains a scarred landscape of historical and environmental consequence, a far cry from the promised industrial paradise of 1923.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.