North Bonneville: The Town That Moved

North Bonneville, Washington has the unusual distinction of being a town that relocated itself entirely rather than disappear. The community grew up next to the Bonneville Dam construction project beginning in nineteen thirty-three and incorporated in June of nineteen thirty-five. For decades it sat quietly on the north shore of the Columbia.

Then in nineteen seventy-one, federal agencies selected that same shoreline as the site for a second powerhouse for the dam complex. Faced with displacement, the townspeople refused to simply disperse. They organized, lobbied Congress, and in nineteen seventy-four won passage of federal legislation authorizing a thirty-five-million-dollar relocation.

Engineers raised the new town site above the hundred-year flood plain and built an entirely new community: streets, utilities, sewage systems, parks, and public buildings. North Bonneville moved as a functioning municipality. It stands today as one of the only towns in American history to have been collectively rebuilt and relocated by an act of Congress.