East Oregonian: Furnish Dam considered 'the dam that died too soon'

The Furnish Dam (Coe Dam) was located 13 miles downstream from Pendleton on a sweeping curve of the Umatilla River. One of Umatilla County's least-known dams, the Furnish was built in 1909 at a cost of about $125,000. Its purpose was to impound 5,500 acre-feet of water for irrigation. Many people thought it to be the finest of its kind in Eastern Oregon.

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Union Pacific Railroad officials entered the picture with the announcement that they planned to relocate much of their track between Pendleton and Yoakum, three miles below the Furnish Dam. Included in their improvement program was a 900-foot tunnel to replace Horseshoe Curve, a stretch of track paralleling the reservoir.

The "Horseshoe" is said to have formed a perfect representation of the genuine article. The tunnel, completed in 1909, was destined to play an important role in this unfortunate drama of the "the dam that died too soon."

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By 1916, the Umatilla was depositing silt on the floor of the reservoir at a rate of 180 acre feet a year. Nobody bothered to measure the additional amount pouring annually through the outlet tunnels and over the spillway.

By 1924, the storage capacity behind the dam had been reduced from 5,500 to 2,800 acre feet. And by 1925, when Stanfield farmers saw little advantage in using the reservoir for storage, about 6 million tons of silt lay heavy and cold at the bottom of the lake. Bedeviled by water troubles, the Furnish Dam Company needed special attention.

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The story of the dam reaches a climax in 1934. By that time the Umatilla River had poured so much silt into the reservoir that water choked the entire valley above the dam during flood periods. Not infrequently the Union Pacific tunnel became flooded with water.

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The railroad bought the dam and the reservoir site. In the summer of 1934, it sent a crew of men to the dam with bulldozers who removed the center section of earth and then dynamited the concrete core, allowing the river to pass through. The once Furnish Dam was destroyed.

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