I have a lot of prints and slides of the dam, but very few digital photos. I took this one Friday evening about 90 minutes before sunset. Because the dam faces west, I wanted to shoot it when the sun was most likely to be shining on it directly.
It had been a while since I had been there, and I had forgotten how loud the water can be coming through the gates and through the hydropower plant (more on that below).
For the record, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was designing the dam in the 1940s and 1950s, the Commonwealth of Kentucky paid the federal government money ($200,000, I think, but I'm not sure) to build the dam piers strong enough to support a two-lane bridge someday.
The bridge was built in the 1980s and opened in 1985, maybe a month after Huntington's East End bridge opened. I wrote a story about the bridge, but the city editor said he was going to hold on to it because of all the East End bridge coverage. He was sort of bridged out.
Anyway, of all the dams on the Ohio, only Greenup and Markland (between Cincinnati and Louisville) were built to be able to support a bridge. Markland's bridge opened several years before Greenup's.
Greenup's hydroelectric power plant was built in France and floated across the ocean and up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. But that's a story I'm saving for my Ohio River picture book, if I ever get around to writing it.
3 comments:
Oh, you just have to write that book, Jim.
My daughter just gave me a copy of Jim Casto's book on the 1937 flood, and it is fabulous. I imagine I have at one time or another seen most of those pictures before, but with Casto's notations, they just seem so much more intense.
And I have just been thinking that my kids are doing pretty well by their old man here lately. I have also received Hubert Skidmore's "Hawks Nest" and Tom Stafford's "Afflicting the Comfortable."
The former I let my son have to read and he was absolutely horrified by the treatment and conditions the tunnel workers had to endure. The latter I have promised to lend to my grandson, age 17 this year, and a junior in high school, as a lesson in political corruption. Since he insists he wants to be a minister of the gospel, he really needs some good grounding in corruption at the highest levels.
But, seriously, Jim, now is a good time to begin getting your outlines and all that. It is amazing how quickly the rest of it falls together once you get the basic plans down.
And that is good advice from someone who let his go by the wayside because he got interested in other things for a while. But one of these days, I keep telling myself.
I have always lived on the Ohio River. As a matter of fact, during the construction of the Greenup Dam in the late '50 my Mother and Father, own and operated a little restaurant the called the Snack Bar where a lot of the guys building the Dam ate lunch. I might have been about 1-2 years old at the time. Does anyone remember or have any photo of the Dam during the early construction. I believe there have been a few that survived the years in our Family but not many. We moved to Northern Ky not long after the project completion but I will never forget what it was like going to work with mom and dad everyday. It was an awesome place to be at that time in my life.
My father worked on the dam. I have been researching sites for pictures of the construction and, especially, ones of the workers. If you have a source/site that will further my research, I would so appreciate this information. Thank you.
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