GRAND COULEE DAM, July 6.--The rebuilding of the entire town of Keller, holding about 250 people, within the next six months, is the task confronting residents there as they prepare to make way for the formation of the 151-mile lake behind Grand Coulee dam. Keller is the first town to be inundated.
Where to re-build it is the main question, according to businessmen who explained their problems to the Daily World correspondent Monday.
"Some folks want to move on the hill there above the town," said A.A. Aldridge, operator of the Keller Grocery and Market, "and others think we ought to build it farther up the highway (Keller-Republic) just outside the edge of the lake," which will reach three miles past Keller.

"The main thing we're interested in is getting a new road to replace the one we've got. Some of them want to build the Cash Creek road to Nespelem into the main highway, but we want a new road to connect with the ferry."
The Keller cable ferry, operated by the highway department, will be put out of service by the lake. the river will be about a mile wide at its narrowest point and it is now planned to put a power-ferry in operation. The present vessel is operated by cables and current of the river.
The town of Keller is doomed to be about 25 feet under water, the bureau of reclamation said. The flood waters are expected to reach it during the summer of 1940.

There is a general ill-feeling against the government among people in the town, Aldridge and a companion, T.S. Moore, Indian, who operates a farm near the town said. "They didn't pay us half enough," Aldridge said. . .

Strange Story

It's a bit confusing and yet it has a perfectly good explanation, one that's been made a couple of times but which doesn't lose anything in the retelling.

You see, Kettle Falls, the old one, had to move out of the way of the river that was getting turned into a lake. The people of Kettle Falls liked their town's name. It was an old one and well known. And yet they couldn't legally just pick up and move out and take their name along. So the city fathers worked out a little deal that made everything fine. . . for Kettle Falls (p.1).

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They just held an election and voted to extend the city limits of Kettle Falls about four miles so that the little high and dry community of Meyers Falls would be included.

 Those folks at Meyers Falls didn't like it much because they'd been getting along pretty good with their own affairs and name. But they hadn't incorporated their town, and outnumbered, they lost their identity. Meyers Falls just ceased to exist and is now Kettle Falls although the names of some of the stores and buildings still read "Meyers Falls."

. . . By and large however, all the moving and shuffling about in this valley of the Columbia is being accomplished with an amazing degree of efficiency, good feeling and speed.

When you stop to consider that four or five thousand people are being virtually uprooted from the soil and the scenes that they have called home, that their lives and businesses are being disrupted, that all this had to be accomplished in a hurry and that the motivating cause was their own intangible and far-away government, you appreciate better the job that the Reclamation Bureau has done and is doing.

. . . Moving day in the reservoir is almost over. Ten separate communities have either been flooded or will be before another year has gone by.

More than a hundred miles of state and secondary highways have been and are being moved. Thirty-five miles of Great Northern Railway is being shifted to higher ground. An estimated 13 million feet of timber is going thru the Lincoln company sawmill down the river from the Spokane's mouth. The shoreline of an 84,000-acre area is being shaved and cleaned of brush and debris. Five or six hundred farms, including orchards, homesteads and diversified ranches, are being eliminated. There are a hundred and one other jobs, all part of a task so big that it stretches your imagination to visualize it all.

This isn't the biggest man-made lake in the history of reclamation. It is the longest, without question, and it involves more people and more property, but it still has to give way in sheer water volume to that stretch of water backed up in the canyon of the Colorado behind Boulder dam. The Boulder dam lake has 30 million acre feet of water. Lake Columbia will have 18 million acre feet. . .