How the entire town of North Bonneville picked itself up and rebuilt a few miles west in the 1970s rather than disband when the government took its ground for Bonneville Dam's second powerhouse.
Upriver a few miles sits a little town called North Bonneville, and it's got a story I can't drive past without telling — because those people did something almost nobody in America has ever done. When the government came to take their town, they picked the whole thing up and moved it, rather than let it die.
Here's how it went. Back in the nineteen-seventies, the government decided to build a second powerhouse at Bonneville Dam — more turbines, more electricity for the region. And they went looking for the ground to build it on, and the ground they wanted was exactly where the town of North Bonneville stood. So the Army Corps of Engineers told the townsfolk what people in these gorge towns had heard before: your town is in the way. You have to go.
Now, usually, that's the end of a town. The people take their checks, they scatter to the four winds, and the place just quietly vanishes off the map. But North Bonneville wasn't having it. The townspeople got together and made a stubborn, remarkable decision: they would not disband. They would move — all of them, together — and rebuild their town whole, a few miles west. And then they fought for it. They organized, they brought in planners, they sat across the table from the Army Corps and hammered out a deal, and then they did the thing. Houses, churches, streets, the whole works — a complete community lifted up and set down again on new ground, up above the floodline, a brand-new town laid out to their own design. They finished it in nineteen seventy-eight.
It cost some thirty-five million dollars, and it stands today as one of the only times in the whole history of this country that a town facing the bulldozer looked the government in the eye and said, 'no — we're coming with us,' and actually pulled it off. So when you roll through North Bonneville, know you're driving through a town that refused to die. Every street of it is proof of what folks can do when they decide their home is worth keeping — even if they've got to carry it down the road to save it.
Photo: Kingofthedead · CC BY-SA 4.0
