Boulder Dam

 

Congress authorized the Boulder Dam on the Colorado River in Black River Canyon in 1928, just before Calvin Coolidge retired from the White House, although engineering had been considering such a project from much earlier. In some ways it created a sense of possibility for some of the large scale civic projects that came to characterize the New Deal because of the investment and the expertise brought together to create a project that seemed beyond the capacity of individual corporations. It is the highest concrete arch dam in the United States and impounds Lake Mead which extends 115 miles upstream. It is 726 feet high and has a power capacity of 1.345 megawatts.