Adrian School View

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

May 12, 1950

Check out the GN outfit cars in the background!

GN Cement Hopper View

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

June 28, 1950. 

Best guess for a location is south of Adrian/Adco on the line to Wheeler, somewhere north of Gloyd. 

"Columbia Basin Project, Irrigation Division 2nd Section East Low Canal. View showing cement siding and unloading operation. Cement is trucked approximately two miles to Batch Plant."

Undated U&I Sugar View

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

No date.

"Beet stockpiles at the Utah and Idaho beet sugar factory near Moses Lake. View taken from atop one of the pulp silos. The three large piles are about 32 feet deep, 200 feet wide, and one-fourth of a mile long."

Note the 4 NP gondolas towards the upper right.

Shoofly Near Tiflis

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

September 22, 1950

Where in the heck is this spot??? It's right here!

1950 Ephrata View

USBR photo, courtesy of the Grant County Historical Society Museum.

October 10, 1950

Work is being done on the third floor of the USBR Ephrata Field Office. Prominent in the background is the 10,000 gallon water tank for the Great Northern. What other landmarks can you see?

Railway Express Delivery To Grand Coulee Dam

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

September 4, 1945

My Chase Of The "New" CBRW SD40-2s

My photos.

October 13, 2025

Koren

Frischnecht

Connell

Near the Moon Road crossing.

Moon Road crossing.

Shano

Early 1960s Beverly View

Courtesy of JoAnn Pearson

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: