Not related to Garden Home per se, but I have two VERY strong childhood visions. Both of these are because my father had worked as an electrician on both the Bonneville Dam, then later on the McNary Dam (further upstream on the Columbia)…
One, did you know that the village of Bonneville Dam was painted TOTALLY GREEN to keep Japanese bomber pilots from “seeing the town”..?? As a child I remember driving my tricycle on the sidewalks and seeing the streets as well as the housetops ALL PAINTED “forest green“. I cannot remember the color of the dam itself (except as white, as it is now, but I would assume it had been painted blue to match the river).
Two, riding in the car to the site where the McNary Dam was to be built, I remember watching the Celilo Indians, standing on the rocks of Celilo Falls and spearing fish. After the McNary Dam was built, it flooded the Celilo Indians’ villages on the Oregon side of the river; of course, the Indians were relocated before the dam flooded everything—but they strongly objected to losing their village site as well as their fishing on the waterfalls.
By Dan Nebert
Garden Home History Project 