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The marvel of the Hoover Dam: Build a huge dam— the largest ever built— across the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border to harness the power and riches of the mighty river.

Tomorrow will be the 76th anniversary of the dedication of the Hoover Dam. As the Great Depression deepened in the early 1930s, a monumental civil engineering project known as the Boulder Canyon Project captured the nation’s attention and stirred its imagination.

President Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, approved funding for construction of the dam in 1930. The multipurpose structure would store irrigation water, provide flood control, and generate power to fuel the fast-paced growth of southern California. In designing and building the dam, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation engineers were tasked with some of the most difficult engineering challenges ever faced. When the last bucket of concrete was placed in the dam on May 29, 1935, the staggering 660-foot thick base almost equaled its height of 726 feet.

Coming amid widespread poverty and unemployment, the massive project not only provided jobs to thousands of unemployed men but offered some of the most complex engineering challenges ever tackled. Perhaps as important, it asserted America’s ability to overcome extreme adversity with technical ingenuity, physical prowess, and unwavering resolve.

Hoover Dam, through the generation of electricity and the orderly dispersal of its waters, fueled the incredible growth of southern California— its large cities, its industrial base, its massive agricultural industry— and created Lake Mead, the world’s largest man-made reservoir.

Here are pictures taken in the 1970s for the EPA’s Project DOCUMERICA that are part of our holdings at the National Archives.

On September 30, 1935, FDR dedicated the completion of the Hoover Dam.

More - Safeguarding Hoover Dam During World War II