Bagnell Dam: A Depression-Era Gamble

The wall of concrete you are near right now holds back one of the largest man made lakes in the world, and it was built in the teeth of the Great Depression. In August of nineteen twenty nine, just weeks before the stock market crashed, the Union Electric Light and Power Company of Saint Louis began what it called the Great Osage River Project. The plan was audacious.

Throw a hydroelectric dam across the Osage River, flood a deep and twisting river valley, and generate electricity for a growing city more than a hundred miles away. Many people believed the thirty million dollar project would collapse along with the economy. It did not.

Instead, it became one of the largest privately financed construction jobs of its era. The dam itself rose about one hundred and forty eight feet high and stretched more than twenty five hundred feet across the valley. To build it, Union Electric had to acquire roughly sixty thousand acres of land.

Homes, churches, schools, businesses, farms, and even cemeteries had to be bought, condemned, moved, or destroyed. Whole towns were erased so the water could rise. And rise it did.

When the gates closed in early nineteen thirty one, the river backed up into every hollow and creek bed, filling a lake with a shoreline longer than the entire coast of California measured in a straight line. For the desperate men of Depression era Missouri, the project meant something priceless, which was work. More than twenty thousand people labored on the dam and its related construction between nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty one, at a time when jobs had all but vanished.

They poured concrete, hauled rock, cleared timber, and relocated the dead from flooded graveyards. The lake officially opened to boat traffic on the thirtieth of May, nineteen thirty one, less than two years after the first shovel bit into the ground. Today the company is known as Ameren Missouri, and the Osage Powerplant behind this dam still spins its turbines.

But stand here and remember. Beneath the pleasure boats and the party coves lies a drowned world of farms and towns, and a dam that a whole generation bet against and lost.