Evergreen Journal: Saving a past drowned by progress

ARIEL -- Beneath the waters of Lake Merwin lies Margaret Hepola's childhood. The roads that led to her school, the locust trees in her front yard, the homestead that had been in the family for three generations.

The government drowned them all 70 years ago in the name of progress.

When the Merwin Reservoir was completed in 1931, it brought jobs and a healthier economy to this area 13 miles east of Woodland. But people who come here now to fish for kokanee don't have any idea what the place was like before the lake covered the locust trees. It's hard to bring history alive when the relics are 160 feet under water.

That's Hepola's mission. At 83, when she isn't balancing the books for her son's company, she's recording memories as fast as she can. She's writing about the beauty and simplicity of life in the Lewis River Valley. She's passing along lessons learned.

An appreciation for nature. A love of hard work. A respect for the people who came before.

The history books will tell you that Washington led the Northwest in bringing power to rural areas. In 1935, 48 percent of Washington's 40,000 farms had electricity, compared with 30 percent in Oregon and Idaho and 6 percent in Montana.

That was due to a major expansion of the electrical industry in the 1920s, including Pacific Power, which moved into Clark and Cowlitz counties and began buying property for the Merwin Dam and Reservoir.

Pacific Power touted the wonders of its first hydroelectric project on the Lewis River's north fork. The 4,000-acre Merwin Reservoir, which opened in 1931, still generates about one-eighth of Pacific Power's total hydro capacity.

But to the families who lived in the company's way, Pacific Power was an intrusion that demolished their way of life.

"My family was one of the first victims of progress and growth management," said Margaret Haller Colf Hepola, who was 10 when it all began. "I cried myself to sleep for as long as I can remember. Nothing was really secure for me."

Hepola has documented some of her memories in a story, "Water Babies," about the people who spent their childhood "at the bottom of the lake." (www.lewisriver.com/historyone.html). She wants people to understand the toll development can take.

She and dozens of other water babies from the Lewis River Valley have held a reunion every year since 1980. They get together to reminisce about the days before the dam, when the river yielded "washtubs full of salmon" and the farms produced peaches and greengage plums and Gravenstein apples.

Her great-grandparents bought the property near Ariel in 1870. Hepola lived there, in the two-story farmhouse with a large yard and picket fence, until she was 13. She remembers walking home from school in the afternoons, watching her father plow the fields for potatoes, corn, hay and rutabagas.

Her home disappears

Her nightmares started in the late 1920s, when her little community began dying. Neighbors moved away as the electric company bought up property. Loggers chopped down trees to make way for Lake Merwin. The surveyors came in 1927. The following year, when Hepola's older brother graduated from eighth grade, the one-room school closed. Not enough students, the state said.

Her family, the last to move, watched the work on the dam. They watched trucks haul cement and freshly cut trees float down the river. Dust covered everything. At the cemetery seven miles east, workers opened the graves and moved the remains to a spot that would stay dry.

In late 1929, the family moved a few miles away. Every day or so, they'd travel back to look at the old homestead. The barn, house and all other buildings had been razed. Only the five locust trees still stood. "We felt robbed of our heritage," Hepola wrote.

"Every day that we went to view the scene, landmarks were disappearing." The Ariel post office. The roads. "We stood on a high spot above our farm and saw the upper one-third of the locust trees in our yard protruding out of the rising water. The trees were in full bloom and it seemed as if they were fighting for survival."

Recently, someone gave Hepola an aerial photograph of her family's farm and the surrounding five miles. "I just pore over that picture," she said. "I still try to travel the country roads in my mind."

Lake Merwin, 15 miles long, is a recreational area as well as a power source. Each year, about 700,000 people come to the parks along the Lewis River to camp, boat, fish or swim. During the past 20 years Hepola and her family have gone boating there, trying to find pieces of her past.

Keeping the past alive

Once they came upon an old stump above the water's edge that had been above the school playground. "We had played hide-and-seek in that area during our recesses at Marble Creek school," Hepola wrote in "Water Babies."

A decade ago, she went to the lake's shore when the water had been lowered so workers could repair the dam's chains and gates. She found part of the old road that had carried pioneers from Woodland to Yale and Cougar. "I had traveled that road many times by wagon and horses or in our old Model T," she wrote.

Her story, published on the Lewis River Web site, is one effort to make sure those memories don't die. But she has many more memories to share, and not enough time to share them.

At 83, Hepola exhausts and inspires. She is a member of two genealogical societies and three historical societies, serves on her precinct committee and the cemetery commission. She handles the books for her son's construction company -- "I keep it all by hand on big ledger sheets" -- and she's just finished the payroll.

Hepola has plans for a long life. She'd like to live to be 500 so she can do everything that needs to be done. Record histories, write what she knows, preserve the past.

"If we don't honor our history and our roots," she said, "the future's not going to mean much to us."

P-I reporter Candy Hatcher can be reached at 206-448-8320 or candyhatcher@seattle-pi.com