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Bagnell
Dam
With
such an enormous amount of water in the state of Missouri,
it wasn't long before people began looking for ways
to harness some of that potential energy for human use.
The first to study the concept of damming the Osage
River was a man named Ralph W. Street of Kansas City,
in 1912, several years before the enactment of the Federal
Water Power Act of 1920.
In
the fall of 1924, Walter Cravens (who had joined Ralph
Street and whose role was to establish financing for
the project) was issued a preliminary permit. During
the same month, November, the Missouri Hydro-Electric
Power Company was incorporated in Missouri. Construction
began immediately, and many facilities were created
in 1924 and the following year, including an enormous
mess hall, an administrative building, a large warehouse,
and a power house. A road was built from the site of
the dam to Bagnell, and the railroad from Bagnell to
the dam site was mostly finished. Unfortunately, the
project encountered problems with funding in 1926 and
construction was halted temporarily.
Ralph
Street proved to be a most determined man - in 1927
he acquired an Option Contract with Stone and Webster,
Inc, out of Boston, one of the largest engineering firms
in the entire United States. Stone and Webster, Inc.
redesigned the project according to the specifications
laid out by the Union
Electric Light and Power Company of St. Louis. The
largest power contract to that date was negotiated,
involving the sale of more than 150 million kilowatt
hours to the St. Joseph Lead Company in the southeastern
portion of Missouri.
An
application was filed with the Missouri Public Service
Commission, for approval of the sale of properties owned
by the Missouri Hydro-Electric Power Company to Union
Electric. The hearing was lengthy and well-discussed
but ultimately the sale was approved in late July of
1929. The announcement was greeted with happiness in
most of the surrounding counties, although the residents
of Linn Creek were less than pleased since the entire
town would need to be razed due to its location. But,
as Spock noted, the needs of the good outweigh the needs
of the few, and the residents of Linn Creek were unable
to stop the continuing evolution of the Bagnell Dam
project.
Even
with so much work toward the project completed, skeptics
abounded, saying that the project simply seemed flat-out
impossible. The sheer scale of the dam itself was, after
all, huge even by today's standards. Nevertheless, the
local residents observed, gripped by excitement, as
Union Electric began its initial clearing on August
6, 1929.
Many
thousands came seeking employment during this time,
but the country was still in the grips of the Great
Depression and, while Bagnell Dam did provide more than
20,500 people with jobs, it was still necessary to turn
many away. Work, generally 9 to 12 hours per day for
each person, went on around the clock. The pay scale
in those days seems puny compared to that of today:
from 35 cents per hour to a little over a dollar per
hour. With jobs so scarce, the workers were glad to
have this pay scale, or any job at all for that matter.
The
project experienced its share of tragedies as well.
Two young children were burned to death when their tent,
soaked in oil to prevent rain from leaking in, caught
fire. Their parents were also badly burned, but survived.
Numerous job-related injuries also occurred, normal
with a task of this scale.
With
so many workers with families, another problem soon
surfaced: providing education to all the children of
the workers, and there were thousands of them. The local
communities simply weren't able to satisfy the educational
needs of such a population. Nevertheless, the communities
opened their doors, but the conditions weren't good,
with sometimes 35 to 40 students per class. The state
offered some minimal funding to offset this problem,
but mainly it was simply a matter of the local communities
enduring this hardship until the dam was completed.
Bagnell
Dam was completed in 1931. Electric service began on
Christmas Eve of that year. In the end, the creation
of Bagnell Dam touched tens of thousands of lives in
ways occasionally bad but mostly good. Its touch hasn't
decreased either: every year hundreds of thousands visit
the lake area for recreation or to tour the Dam. The
ultimate legacy of Bagnell Dam is not the water it holds
back, but the current beauty of the area, due mostly
to the creation of the dam.
The
Lake
The
Osage River was Impounded and the lake began to fill
on February 2, 1931. The lake was opened to travel
May 30, 1931. The Lake of the Ozarks covers 58,000
acres, impounds 650 billion gallons of water and has
1,375 miles of cove indented shoreline. Thousands
of visitors travel to the Lake of the Ozarks every year
to enjoy the beauty and recreation that was brought
about by the Great Osage River Project.
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