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Camber Dam — formally the Camber Hydroelectric Power Station — is the pale wall of concrete that stands four hundred metres above Lochdam. It gave the town its power, half its name, and — when the river it tamed fell still — the slow sickness in its lake.
Edgar Camber came to Blue Rock in 1903 with his family. He had grown up an engineer's son in Pittsburgh, made his money in the steelworks, and was looking west for new work. He saw the river, the mountains, and the mine, and proposed a dam and a power plant high in the peaks — one that would tame the river and carry electricity to both the mine and the town. The plan was approved, and by 1907 the Camber Dam stood eighty metres high, four hundred metres above the settlement, with its powerhouse built into the wall. Near the church, but well apart from the other townsfolk, Edgar raised the dam director's residence — the house that would come to be called Camber House.
Below the dam the great river shrank to a trickle a few metres wide, and the lake settled into stillness. By 1910 the place had power, a church, a main street, shops and schools, and it was time to name it a town. The minister Conan Barclay proposed Lochdam Town — loch for the lake, dam for the dam — and the name stuck.
For two generations the dam and the mine flourished side by side, and a job at the coal or the dam was the thing young men dreamed of. But the still water had turned the lake stagnant, and the waste from the mine, with nowhere left to run, gathered in its depths until fishing and bathing were forbidden. Through every hard turn the dam's owners put the town last. In the Depression the Camber heirs cut wages and held the power price high while a third of their workers lost their jobs; when the military base wound down at the start of the sixties, they raised the price by nearly thirty percent over two years. The current was theirs to sell, and they sold it dear.
When the mine was condemned and closed in 1970, the old partnership between coal and power broke, and the Camber heirs let half their own people go and raised the price once more. Then, in February 1976, fire broke out in the powerhouse. It began in the control room, where an electrician was found dead. The heirs could not afford to rebuild, and the insurance covered only half. After a few dark months the town was wired instead to the Rocky Reach Dam at Wenatchee — outside power that brought no work — and the Camber plant was left to the mountain.
By 1991 the powerhouse stands gutted and sealed behind chains and locks, with only an old watchman to keep an eye on the ruin. It has given no light in fifteen years, and what it keeps now is sealed — pending release.
Camber House · The Mirror · Lochdam Town · Caledonia Church