An environmental historian, referred to once as “the drowned towns guy,” is making a visit to Sweet Home as part of a project surrounding the Green Peter and Foster dams.
Bob Reinhardt, an associate professor in the Department of History and the School of the Environment at Boise State University, will be hosting a “History Jamboree” from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on March 28-29 at the Evangelical Church, 1347 Long St.
The two-day event is an opportunity to not only share information about the history of Sweet Home before the dams were built, but also an effort to collect more information and gather together artifacts on the subject.
Reinhardt is building a database, “The Atlas of Drowned Towns,” on his website (www.drownedtowns.com) as he explores the history of communities that were displaced when dams were constructed throughout the American West.
“Beneath the shadows and underneath the reservoirs of these dams lie the remnants of homelands, towns, villages and other homes that were displaced or eliminated to make way for twentieth-century ideas of progress,” he stated on his website.
Reinhardt wants to identify the hundreds of places that have been moved or simply “disappeared” to make way for big dams, he said. While historians and scholars are aware that homes and businesses were displaced for dam construction, not much else is actually known or recorded about it. Reinhardt’s goal is to collect those details.
“Then there are deeper questions that I’m much more interested in, like what was it like to live in these places and to love them and have to leave them, and having people respond, and why did they respond as they did to displacement,” he said. “Those are kind of the big questions.”
The question about “drowned towns” was planted in Reinhardt’s mind some 20 years ago and he even wrote his master’s thesis on the topic. With personal connections to the North Santiam Canyon, he spent 15 years researching the Detroit Dam area, but is now expanding his work to other areas, with the Foster and Green Peter dams first on the list.
Having been so immersed in studying Detroit Dam, Reinhardt said he’s excited about this experience in Sweet Home because it’s basically unexplored territory for him.
“I’m really excited to see who shows up, what they want to share, the stories they want to tell,” he said.
People are encouraged to bring their memories and personal stories about life in Sweet Home and Foster before, during and after the dam construction that will “help illustrate the vibrancy and vitality of life in the area as it was before the dams went in.”
“I’m especially interested in how the dams and dam construction changed peoples’ lives, particularly in terms of people having to move,” Reinhardt said.
The “History Jamboree” will include stations where items can be digitized for his online database. Items might include personal diaries or letters that talk about the dam situation, photographs, relevant school yearbooks, evidence of population growth as dam workers moved in, or artifacts connected to the dam area (such as a glass or matchbook from a bar that is now underwater, or a piece of wood from the former Foster Covered Bridge, or a commemorative plate about the dam, etc.). Oral histories will also be recorded.
“We’re hoping that there might be some people out there that were actually around when these dams went up in ’66 and ’68,” Reinhardt said.
While the historian noted he has grads assisting him on the project back home, the work is ultimately made up of “the bigger team of people,” the locals who are helping track down the information he needs.
“Local historical societies and museums are critical for this project because often these places, especially in the American West, that were moved or limited were very small and so they don’t have much in the way of sort of material evidence,” Reinhardt said. “They’re also the people that know people in town and in the area who are either descendants or, in some cases, were there themselves when the dams were built.”
It’s the combination of an altered environment and the effects it had on people that gets Reinhardt excited.
“I’m an environmental historian, which means I study how people interact with the environment and vice-versa; how people try to change the environment and how the environment changes people. Dams and rivers, for me, are such a great example of this,” he said. “I’m a guy that’s fascinated by these structures (dams) – they are engineering wonders – but I’m much more fascinated by the effects of these dams on both human society and on environments.”
His work pushes him to study how people responded to displacement and why they responded that way.
“I’m fascinated by the spectrum of response which, depending on time and place, ranges from very excited enthusiasm for the construction of a dam that’s gonna end up inundating one’s home and making you move… and on the other end of the spectrum there’s very vocal resistance.”
Reinhardt knows he’ll never be able to tell all the stories in his lifetime, but he’d be happy if he can successfully build and provide the infrastructure and processes for others to continue the work. Ultimately, he’d like historians, scholars and communities to be able to find the connections that displaced communities have with each other. He’d like people to be able to put their shared stories in conversation with each other and draw lessons from those connections.
“Personally, I love these kinds of places on rivers, kind of a little bit out there, places that might be thought of as on the margins, but these are lovely places that people love and are very dear to them,” he said. “If I can be a part of a process by which these places that are truly important become valued in a more meaningful and deeper way, that would be really wonderful. I would be honored to be a part of that.”