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:
