History
The Willamette Falls Canal and Locks Company was formed in 1868 to build a navigation route around the falls. Construction then began on building a canal and lock system around the west end of the falls. The locks opened on January 1, 1873, as the first multi-lift navigation locks in the United States at a cost of $560,000, and has been in continuous use ever since. Maria Wilkins, a steamship, was the first vessel to use the locks. The Army Corps of Engineers purchased the lock system from Portland General Electric in 1915 for $375,000. The locks were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Read more about this topic: Willamette Falls Locks
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)