Finding Old Detroit: Recovering and Interpreting the Histories of Communities Displaced by River Development Projects

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Driving along Highway 22 in the western Cascade mountains of Oregon, motorists can’t help but notice Detroit Lake (created by Detroit Dam, a US Army Corps of Engineers multipurpose river development project) and the small town of Detroit on the reservoir’s banks. But they can’t see the site of Old Detroit, the small community inundated by the reservoir; nor can they know too much about the community’s history, which is similarly buried in small archives, the footnotes of old newspaper articles, the deep recesses of US Army Corps of Engineers archives, and in the fast-fading memories of former residents and descendants. This paper explains the author’s multidisciplinary efforts to recover and interpret the history of Old Detroit, and the lessons learned about how to find, understand, and value such lost places.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35637.0