Construction began on “the greatest concrete structure in the world” on Sept. 1933 when Washington’s governor Clarence Martin dumped the first bucket of what would be 21 millions tons of concrete. He was paid 75-cent for one hour’s work. Eight years later in the spring of 1941 the Grand Coulee Dam began distributing the electricity that made it possible for the Pacific Northwest to host so many aluminum plants for building armanents during the Second World War. Horace Sykes obviously visited the dam site sometime before the war – sometime in the late 1930s. Of course there are pictorial histories of this construction that would help us choose the year, but none of them are at hand. Horace photographed the dam from the Grand Coulee Bridge, a steel creation made extra-strong for handling the heavy equipment and materials used during the dam’s construction. (Click to Enlarge)
