Professor of history at Boise State University, Bob Reinhardt has created The Atlas of Drowned Towns, a public history project that explores the histories of the dozens of communities in the American West inundated by dam construction in the twentieth century. From the Snake and Sacramento to the Columbia and Colorado, massive hydroelectric, irrigation, and flood control dams tower over western rivers.
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. For the broader public as well as policy makers, these disappeared places have passed out of memory and into myth. Recovering the submerged pasts of lost communities will reveal the historical significance of marginalized places in the American West, encourage appreciation of the complexity of such places, and provide lessons for the future of river development and community displacement.
