The "dam stone"

Someone else has already said it – sometimes you have to travel a long way from home to learn something important about your home! In our case it involved the "dam stone!"

At the "Little White House" there was a walkway over to where the museum had originally been that was lined with a procession of the flags of the fifty states and a stone from each state. Each state had been asked to send a special stone to represent their state – usually a variety of stone found in that state carved or engraved with an outline of the state or some such. However the stone from the state of Washington was apparently just a stone – neither a distinctive type of stone from the state nor any carved or engraved shape.

The story is that the widow of James Delmage Ross, who had held two positions in the Roosevelt Administration – member of the first Securities and Exchange Commission, created to prevent any future market crashes, and director of the Bonneville Power Authority to oversee the construction and operation of that dam – had heard of the request for a stone and had asked that a stone be removed from the Ross Dam on the Skagit River northeast of Seattle and sent for Washington's stone.

J.D., as he was known, had been the sparkplug and the designer of the whole Skagit River public power operation, a system of three dams supplying nearly half of the electricity to the city of Seattle. The design and construction had occurred during the 1920's in spite of opposition from some in the area who decried this type of "Socialism" involved in the intrusion of a city into the public power arena. So fierce was the fighting that a Mayor of Seattle who opposed the project was thrown out by a specially called "recall" election!

The biographical sketch of Ross that I found called him "The Father of Seattle City Light." The most amazing part is that Ross, an immigrant (from Canada) was completely self-taught in all of electricity generation, dam design and dam construction, but was obviously quite skilled at "getting the job done."