Shasta Dam Construction by Howard Colby c. 1940

Howard Colby was the professional photographer hired to memorialize the construction of the construction of the Shasta Dam. This is an 8 x 10 silver print, unmounted. Condition fine with great tones and sharp contrast.

Shasta Dam (called Kennett Dam before its construction) is a concrete arch-gravity dam[3] across the Sacramento River in the northern part of the U.S. state of California, at the north end of the Sacramento Valley. The dam mainly serves long-term water storage and flood control in its reservoir, Shasta Lake, and also generates hydroelectric power. At 602 feet (183 m) high, it is the ninth-tallest dam in the United States and forms the largest reservoir in California.

Envisioned as early as 1919 because of frequent floods and droughts troubling California's largest agricultural region, the Central Valley, the dam was first authorized in the 1930s as a state undertaking. However, this coincided with the Great Depression and building of the dam was transferred to the federal Bureau of Reclamation as a public works project. Construction started in earnest in 1937 under the supervision of Chief Engineer Frank Crowe. During its building, the dam provided thousands of much-needed jobs; it was finished twenty-six months ahead of schedule in 1945. When completed, the dam was the second-tallest in the United States after Hoover, and was considered one of the greatest engineering feats of all time.