Big Bend Railroad History

Monday, March 9, 2026

Early 1960s Beverly View

Courtesy of JoAnn Pearson

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Mystery Photo Of Pretty Girls-Or Not

USBR photo. Courtesy of the Grant County Historical Society Museum.

December 8, 1934

Recently I had a chance to start to look through the nearly 1 million photos donated to this museum in Ephrata by the Bureau of Reclamation. Most photos in the 1934 cabinet have no caption information, but any person with knowledge of how Grand Coulee Dam was constructed would be able to figure out what was going on. But, that's not really my forte.

I found the picture, below, that most people looking at construction history of the dam would be stumped with. Why a picture of three pretty girls?

I knew right away, because of the railroad construction to the dam, which is my forte.

Left to right: Princess Mildred Smith, from Wilbur. Queen Louise Turner, from Harrington. Princess Lorraine Morgan, from Grand Coulee Center.

The winners of the Queen of the Columbia Contest.

To summarize, the Queen of the Columbia was a beauty contest that was timed to coincide with the completion of the railroad to the Grand Coulee Dam construction site. They were to preside over the placing of the golden spike at Grand Coulee.

I wrote up a story on this contest for Them Dam Writers, which I posted back in 2022. The winner even got to run the David Ryan steam engine, a worn out Climax.

If you don't want to look at the story I linked to, here are a few newspaper photos I was working with for that piece:

Saturday, March 7, 2026

You Thought Locomotives Were Big

My photo.

February 6, 2021

Big business in the small town of Coulee City (population around 550) is grain. Here is proof!

While the round tanks are of various vintages, the crib elevators are approaching the century mark in age, having been built by Coulee City grain pioneer George McDonald. All are dwarfing the SD40-2s of the Washington Eastern. Oh, and these elevators and tanks are the small ones in town.