Portland's Lost Waterfront

The long and difficult project of making a shipping channel from Portland to the sea involved a lot more than simply dredging. As anyone knows who has played in the mud as a kid, channeling water to go the way you want it to go involves building dikes and dams as well. From the lower Columbia all the way to the Portland harbor the Army Engineers erected these dikes and dams in places where the water could be directed in a way to make the channel deeper, and to insure that the flow of the river would keep the channel from silting up. Before these efforts the charts of the river would change dramatically over the course of several seasons of the rivers fluctuating from the late summer and early autumn low water to the floods of the spring freshet. Sand bars would appear where there were none before and large snags dragged downstream by the current would create barriers and hazards. A dam at the Willamette's mouth The U.S. Army Engineers operated several snag boats to deal wi...