project entirely on its own through the sale of revenue bonds. However, the 1930s were a time of economic crisis with the onset of the Great Depression and a severe drought that devastated the agricultural sector, pushing the unemployment rate in California up to 20 percent. The project was approved in the state legislature by a slim margin, mostly riding on Central and Northern California voters, who needed both the jobs and the water. Southern California generally opposed the project because they needed money to build an aqueduct to the Colorado River, from which the state had previously secured rights. In 1933, the state authorized the sale of bonds to fund the Central Valley Project, whose main component was to be Shasta Dam. Unable to raise the necessary money, California turned to the federal government for help. In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the Central Valley Project as part of the New Deal. The construction works at Shasta Dam and other parts of the project would provide thousands of much-needed jobs, contributing a major portion of the Depression era federal job-creation programs. Roosevelt first considered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for building the project, but ultimately transferred it to the Reclamation Service, the precursor to the Bureau of Reclamation, which had expertise in building large concrete dams as demonstrated in the Hoover Dam (Boulder Canyon) Project several years earlier. Reclamation chose Frank Crowe, the superintendent of Hoover Dam construction, to direct operations at Shasta Dam. Construction Preparations and camps The groundbreaking and official naming ceremony of Shasta Dam occurred on September 12, 1937 in the small town of Kennett shortly upstream of the dam. Congress initially approved $12 million for the project. Within five years Kennett would be submerged under the rising waters of Shasta Lake. The dam was initially known as Kennett Dam, but was eventually named after nearby Mount Shasta. After surveying several nearby sites, the Bureau of Reclamation chose to build the dam in a deep canyon about a mile above the abandoned smelter town of Coram and two-and-a-half miles below Kennett. The dam was planned to be over high. The winning bid of $35,939,450 for construction came from Pacific Constructors Inc., a conglomerate of twelve smaller companies. Construction started with the excavation of millions of tons of bedrock from the canyon walls adjacent to the construction site, forming keyways for the dam foundations. The