BROADCASTS.com

IN THE SMALL hours of the morning of Aug. 16, 1906, a powerful explosion jolted residents awake near the little town of Willamette, which today is a neighborhood of West Linn. It came from the direction of the nearby Tualatin River.\n\nThe cause was soon discovered. When the first rays of the morning sun fell on the Oregon Iron and Steel Co.\u2019s diversion dam, located a little over three miles from the river\u2019s mouth, a 20-foot-wide hole had been blasted in its center. The river water was still gushing through it.\n\nExecutives of the Oregon Iron and Steel Co. were outraged. In newspaper interviews the next day, they pledged that the dam would be speedily rebuilt, and for weeks afterward newspapers like the Hillsboro Argus and the Oregon City Enterprise ran advertisements from the company offering a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever blew it up.\n\nThey also fanned out around the neighborhood of farmers and residents along the Tualatin River upstream from the dam, making the same offer. But nobody seemed to know anything. Most of the residents wouldn\u2019t even admit to having heard the blast.\n\nThey all knew, of course. Some of them had been in the party that had crept up to the dam in the pre-dawn darkness, set the charge, and touched it off.... (Lake Oswego, Clackamas County; 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/24-01.tualatin-dam-dynamited.html)