I've heard of the Lake of the Ozarks as a tourist destination. When I learned that the river spanned by the US-65 bridge was called the Lake of the Ozarks, I decided to investigate. When I saw that the bridge was just downstream from the Truman Lake Dam, I figured the river at Warsaw was the upper reach of a reservoir for a downstream dam. So I looked for that dam and found this one.
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| cdm_2179, Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives |
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| I Grew Up In Missouri posted LAKE of the OZARKS, in its early beginnings at the DAM! Note the lack of development. Even with all the grief this lake gets from the other Ozarks Lake social circles, this is a wonderful lake. In the OZARKS we are very lucky that ALL of our LAKES are GREAT LAKES with each their own special candy coating. If you’ve only experienced one of them, then you are missing all of them. 😎 |
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| cdm_2173, Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives |
Md Nurujjaman Sarkar posted two photos with the comment:
The Lake of the Ozarks was created by the construction of the Bagnell Dam, which began on August 8, 1929. The clearing of the land, which included cutting down 30,000 acres of timber and demolishing the original town of Linn Creek, was part of the preparation for this dam and the subsequent flooding of the valley to form the lake. The dam was completed in April 1931, and the lake was filled and officially opened to boat traffic by May 1931.Dam construction: The Bagnell Dam was the project that initiated the creation of the lake, with construction starting in 1929 and finishing in 1931.Land clearing: The 30,000 acres of timber were cut down and the area was cleared to prepare the basin for the lake. This was a significant and expensive part of the project.Linn Creek demolition: The original town of Linn Creek was demolished and submerged by the rising waters. Many buildings were torn down or moved to higher ground, with some residents relocating to the new Linn Creek or the new county seat of Camdenton.Lake formation: The dam's completion in April 1931 led to the lake reaching its full elevation by May 1931. It was officially opened to boat traffic on May 30, 1931.
Douglas Kolkmeyer: The clearing crews ran daylight to dark year round and they had to burn everything they cleared.
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Lake of the Ozarks Drone posted three images with the comment:
Missouri Bicentennial Pulaski County and area history - 02-20-22 – In the summer of 1929, thousands of jobless men from across the land streamed to the area to work on the mammoth hydro-electric dam Union Electric Company was to construct to impound the waters of the Osage River. More than 20,000 men worked on the dam, laboring day and night for two years to create the Osage Hydro-Electric Plant, better known as Bagnell Dam.Bagnell Dam was completed in October 1931. In the process, they created the sprawling Lake of the Ozarks, one of the Midwest’s most popular recreation spots and the fourth largest man-made lake in the United States.Missouri Bicentennial Pulaski County and Area History Please like my page and also leave a like for each story you read at this link. Thanks!
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| Mark Pitts posted From Boring Postcards Brett Wanamaker shared |
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| - Bagnell Dam was the largest - and last - major dam in the U.S. to be built with private investment. - Bagnell Dam is one-half mile long, rising 148 feet high from bedrock. That’s comparable to a building 12 stories high and seven blocks long. It holds back 600 billion gallons of water. - Ameren Missouri invested $53 million in upgrades at Bagnell Dam in 2017 and 2018, including 67 post-tensioned anchors and more than 66 million pounds of new concrete to weigh down the dam and secure it into the bedrock. - Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks is one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, covering 86 square miles in four counties. [It was the largest man-made lake in the USA when it was created.] |
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| Ameren It was the only major construction project in the country after the stock market crashed two months after work began on the dam. It started producing power on Oct 16, 1931, just two years after construction began. [Below is a source that says it was completed in 18.5 months.] |
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| Mike Elking posted, cropped The Birth of the Lake In February 1931, the Bagnell Dam was finally completed, and the Osage River began to fill the valley. What was once rolling farmland and river bluffs started transforming into the Lake of the Ozarks—at the time, the largest man-made lake in the world. |
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| MargaritaVilleRestortLakeOfTheOzarks |
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| sos, Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives "The Lake of the Ozarks is one of the largest man-made lakes in the United States. With a surface area of 55,000 acres, stretching 92 miles from end to end, and over 1,150 miles of shoreline, this lake brings in millions of dollars in tourism to Missouri each year." A collection of 845 photographs |
Kathy Heintz Powell posted two photos with the comment: "Bagnell Dam Osage Hydro Plant at Lake Ozark, MO. My work home for 36 years of the almost 41 years with Ameren."
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It looks like they first built every other bay.
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| cdm_2586, Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives Image showing the view looking west from the north east corner of the spillway cofferdam. |
This photo confirms that they started with alternating bays.
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| cdm_2773, Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives Image showing an upstream view of the spillway. |
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| MillerCountyMuseum "The dam is of concrete gravity type, 2,543 feet long. It consists of a 511 foot long power station, 520 foot long spillway section and two non-overflow retaining sections adjacent to the river banks. The dam supports a concrete highway structure, which includes a 20 foot wide roadway and a three foot wide sidewalk, both spanning the entire length of the dam." |
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| MillerCountyMuseum, CityOfLakeOzark has the same information. The power company that built this dam also operated the Keokuk Dam. "The accomplishments achieved during the building of Bagnell Dam are incredible. When added to the fact that the project was completed in 18 ½ months, four months ahead of schedule, they become nearly incomprehensible." In addition to the dam and transmission lines, roads and a village for the workers also had to be built. [The article has a detailed timeline of the construction.] |
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| Underestimated Arsenal posted "I didn't see a single log or even a stick floating on the surface," H. H. Meyer wrote in Motor Boating in May 1934, after a long day on the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. The lake had been formed in 1931 by Union Electric's dam across the Osage River at Bagnell. Its engineers, Stone and Webster of Boston, had been given a clock: a set time to finish the dam and deliver power to the St. Louis area. This photograph, taken from the air in 1932, shows what they built. Bagnell Dam is a concrete gravity dam 2,543 feet long, with a road along its top. From the west bank on the left: a retaining section 1,181 feet long, a spillway of twelve gates, 520 feet, the power station, 511 feet, and a retaining section 331 feet long on the east bank. Water never flows over the two retaining sections, and together they make up 1,512 of the 2,543 feet. That is where the choice was. Across the major part of the river valley lay about 50 feet of gravel and silt, and the Historic American Engineering Record, the federal survey of engineering works held at the Library of Congress, says that earth, rather than concrete, retaining sections "would have been more economical in terms of material savings." But the record does not stop there. "It was determined however," it goes on, "that use of concrete to build the retaining sections would save approximately one year in time of construction as well as provide other advantages." It cites a January 1931 article in Civil Engineering for this. It gives the year, not the arithmetic behind it. So the engineers took concrete, giving up the saving in material for the year. Construction began on August 6, 1929. The stock market crashed about two months later, and the work went on. By the time it was done, an estimated 20,500 people had worked on the dam, and at the busiest, in the summer of 1930, 4,600 were there at once. They all came by one road. The only road to the site crossed the farm of Lemmie and Rebecca Strange, and their son Gaylord, born in 1913, remembered the town of Dam Site that grew up on their land: "There were a lot of people living in tents; the hills and valleys were full of tents and people paid $3.00 per month for a place to put a tent." On October 16, 1931, the Osage plant went into commercial service, tied into the St. Louis system. Today it still makes power, and the road along the top of that concrete, Business Route 54, still carries people across the Osage River at Lake Ozark. The cofferdam that kept the Osage River out of Bagnell Dam's first work pit was built with a way to flood the pit on purpose. The Historic American Engineering Record says "a sluiceway capable of flooding the entire excavated area within twenty-four hours" was fitted in the river end of that cofferdam, "to prevent erosion of the slopes of the earth prism supporting the steel sheeting if the cofferdam were overtopped." The pit, where the spillway and the west end were built, was unwatered on March 1, 1930, and the first concrete went in on April 9, 1930. The concrete itself needed sand the river could not supply. The record says the Osage "does not produce enough sand for use in making concrete," so a plant at Bagnell used sand rollers to crush small rock into sand. In all, about 553,000 cubic yards of concrete went into the dam. The photographer is not known. The print is in the Airscapes series of the U.S. Army Air Forces, held by the National Archives (item 23941751). The mount reads "Rec'd from Scott Field, Ill. - 8/6/32," and the lettering along the bottom of the print reads 7-18-32-11A, which I read as 11 in the morning on July 18, 1932. The archive dates the whole series only as 1917 to 1964, so that date is my reading of the lettering, and it agrees with the mount. The print came on an album card with typed and handwritten notes. I cropped it out of the card, which also removed the lettered caption along its bottom edge. The scan was already black and white, and nothing else was changed. One honest limit: this shows the finished dam, nine months after its first power. The choice the post tells of was made before the first concrete, and it is built into what you see rather than shown by it. Where the numbers come from. The twenty-eight months is from the Historic American Engineering Record, Bagnell Dam and Osage Power Plant, HAER No. MO-117 ("within twenty-eight months" to complete the project and deliver power to the St. Louis area), and from the Miller County Museum and Historical Society's Bagnell Dam page ("a 28 month period"). The section lengths, the 20,500 workers, the 4,600 at the peak and the dates are from the same HAER record. The earth and concrete choice, and the year it saved, are from its companion volume, HAER No. MO-117-A, East Retaining Section, which cites G. R. Strandburg in Civil Engineering, January 1931, and A. W. Clark in Engineering News-Record, March 26, 1931. I could not reach either article, so the year rests on the record's account of them, and nothing I read says how the year was saved. Gaylord Strange's words are from his 2007 account of Dam Site in the Miller County Historical Society's collection. H. H. Meyer's words are from Motor Boating, May 1934. The dam was built by Union Electric Light and Power Company of St. Louis, with Stone and Webster of Boston as its engineers, and about 20,500 people worked on it. The photograph belongs to the Army Air Forces crews whose names the card does not give. |
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| Google Photo Index |
I have not been able to find the MW capacity of the dam.
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| Photo, Jun 2022 |
Another reminder that 2019 was a very wet year in the USA.
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| Susan Murphy 0:26 video, Jun 2019 |
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| Jeff Lange, May 2021, cropped |
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| April Napper, Jul 2019 |
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| Missouri's Historic Highways posted May 1952 US 54 at Bagnell Dam |
Mike DeBroeck posted nine photos with the comment: "Glimpse inside Bagnell Dam during its first major upgrade. Originally published in Shore Magazine 2026."
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