The Great Osage River Project
| A Brief History of Lake of the Ozarks
The Great Osage River Project has been recognized as one of the
greatest engineering and construction feats of its time. Site work
began on August 6, 1929 by Union Electric Company of St. Louis,
Missouri and the engineering corporation of Stone and Webster. The
final price tag would be $30 million for the last and largest major
dam to be built in the United States entirely with private capital.
Four months after construction began, came the stock market crash
followed by many years of the Great Depression.
The gigantic
undertaking created a gold rush type scene. News spread quickly and
prospective employees began pouring into the area. They came by
foot, on horseback, floating down the river, piled high in trucks,
and a few in automobiles. The area was so remote that roads were
dirt and the nearest railway stopped 15 miles away in Eldon. During
the worst depression that the United States had ever seen, Union
Electric created nearly 10,000 new jobs and, at that time, the
largest man-made lake in the world. There were some 4,600 craftsmen
and laborers working at one point in time, twenty-four hours per day
and seven days per week. During the next two years, the project
would see 20,500 workers come and go.
Until the Great Osage River Project was
started, this land was sparsely populated. Most of the residents were
settlers who came because of the 1864 Homestead Act. That Act would
allow 160 acre tracts of land to be deeded, at $1.25 per acre, if
the person lived on the land for five years. Union Electric created
its own city. Dormitories, mess halls and the Historic Willmore
Lodge were the first structures built,
followed by a commissary, hospital, a concrete plant, miles of
roads, a railroad and even a jail for the rowdy misbehavers.
Using equipment that seems pretty crude now, the total
construction was completed in just two and a half years. Crews
worked daylight to dark, and even 24 hours per day when it came to
pouring concrete for the dam. A major phase of the construction was
to build a 15 mile railroad from Eldon to a tiny town called
Bagnell, located 5 miles below the dam. Several more miles of rail
was built from Bagnell to the dam site and several spur lines to
deliver millions of tons of material to stockpile areas. A railway
and wagon bridge was constructed about 200 yards below the dam site
to cross the Osage River to deliver to the steel yard and the
concrete plant.
|
  |
The mammoth project was divided into three major areas of
activity.
One part was the dam and power house. This also
included all of the camps, contructing and maintaining roads,
designing and building railways, and erecting a river bridge for
rail, car, and wagons. Dozens of permanent and temporary structures
were designed and fabricated. Many of the buildings are in use
today, a full seventy years later. During low river water levels,
wooden piers from the old bridge can still be seen. Steel pilings,
girders, and cable are low river water hazards for boats and fishing
lines. The dam is of concrete gravity type, 2543 feet long
supporting a 20 foot wide roadway and three foot wide sidewalk. The
power station is 511 feet long and the flood control spillway
section is 520 feet long. The power plant produces 215,000 kilowatts
mainly to the eastern part of Missouri and St. Louis.
A second
portion of the undertaking, was the electrical transmission lines to
carry the generated power to the consumer.
The third area of
work, was the water reservoir. This included surveying nearly 100
square miles, clearing thousands of trees that covered 30,000 acres,
mapping the whole 100 square miles, and outlining where the
shoreline would be. The reservoir covers 57,000 acres or 92 square
miles, has nearly 1,375 miles of shoreline (more shoreline than the
sea coast of the State of California), and impounds 617 billion
gallons of water. The dam was completed and the Lake, as of then,
unnamed began to fill on February 2, 1931. The Lake was opened to
use May of 1931, only four months after it started filling and two
years before the end of the Prohibition Act.
List of Works Consulted
Carole Tellman Pilkington,
The Story of Bagnell
Dam, Lake Area Chamber of Commerce,1989
National
Register of Historic Places, NPS form 10-900-a,section
7.
Buford Foster, That's The Way It
Was,1978
T. Victor Jeffries, Before The Dam
Water,1974
AmerenUE, Bagnell Dam Construction
Photos,1929-1931
Video Productions
Unlimited, Current Photos,1990's
Top of
Page
|
|
