Recently I participated in the Umpqua Plein Air, a week of outdoor landscape painting with the participants’ finished paintings to hang at Umpqua Valley Arts, the event’s sponsoring institution. I was interested in painting distinctively local scenes, and one place I thought I would explore was Winchester Dam. Researching before I painted, I soon learned that the place is the center of quite the controversy. Many want it removed – in fact there is a website devoted to documenting news pertaining to this cause: winchesterdam.com.
In an effort to find a better view, I went down the metal stairs (far left in the picture above), feeling as if I were descending into some abandoned factory. At the bottom of the stairs (through that dark opening visible to the left in the picture above), there is a viewing room with windows partly underwater, where it is possible to see fish (if there are any) traversing the fish ladder. The space has seen better days, with scratched plexiglass covering the viewing windows, a scattering of trash as if possibly someone had lived in the viewing room in the not too distant past. A few small fish were visible through the windows, swirling in the current.
Through a grated window overlooking the fish ladder, I saw the view I needed to paint. I liked it because it highlighted the power of the river, how humans put things in the way, and the river just keeps flowing. The line of sight curved right through the scene and the evening light was beautiful.
Winchesterdam.com has some pretty interesting history about the area. The town of Winchester was actually founded a year before Roseburg (1850 vs 1851) and was for a few years the county seat. According to the Roseburg Review in 1890, the original dam was made from the giant pine trees that once lined the river:
“Last Sunday was a gala day for Winchester … People came from every direction and by noon the town presented an appearance not unlike a Fourth of July celebration … The dam is a massive structure … timbers consist of huge pine trees not less than four feet in diameter … flooring laid with planks about a half inch apart to prevent swelling … to be filled with sand and natural debris…”
According to Winchesterdam.com, the fish ladder was built in 1945, the same one that is still in use to this day. Prior to 1945, the dam had a V shape cut into the top of it, through which migrating fish jumped.
