Just before Christmas 1939, Alcoa announced the construction of an aluminum plant, the first in the West, in the lowlands near the Port of Vancouver on the Columbia River. Up the river two years earlier, Bonneville Dam turbines began cranking out cheap hydropower. The matching of the two wasn’t happenstance. The promised plant needed the cheap electricity to keep its potlines hot as America quietly prepared for war.
Aluminum, the most plentiful metal on earth, is difficult to extract from bauxite ore. It wasn’t until 1886 that chemist Charles Martin Hall devised the first means to produce commercial aluminum inexpensively. With World War II on the horizon, the country prepared to ramp up.
Alcoa sought Northwest plants, and in late 1939, announced one in Vancouver.
The Columbian hailed Alcoa’s declaration as the “greatest Christmas present” for the community and the Northwest. Mayor A.N. Stanley proclaimed it “the beginning of a new city” with “virtually unlimited” possibilities. Businesses were optimistic about the economic impact of Alcoa’s announcement.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Bonneville Dam’s power over to the public and created the Bonneville Power Administration. Although public ownership was controversial, it kept electricity costs low, and the BPA generated power inexpensively at about 0.2 cents a kilowatt-hour for years.
Although America wouldn’t enter the war until after Pearl Harbor, Germany invaded Poland in 1938, lighting the European fuse for the World War II. The war would draw Vancouver a second time into shipbuilding and providing the framework and parts for airplanes. The Kaiser Shipyard and Alcoa aluminum were to WWII what Standifer shipyards and the Spruce Mill were to WWI — and then some.
Drawn by wartime work in the shipyards or with Alcoa, thousands of people moved to Vancouver, more than doubling its population. Then, thanks to Bonneville’s abundant and inexpensive electricity, the Vancouver Housing Authority erected thousands of modest yet modern houses for them to live in. This boom consummated Mayor Stanley’s boast of a “new city,” for Vancouver would never be the same.
Alcoa molded its first ingots in late 1940. The declaration of war boosted work at the plant. By January 1941, 300 people went to work there. Kaiser paid better, drawing employees from the potlines, so Alcoa was constantly recruiting new workers.
Wanting to see firsthand how West Coast war production was progressing, President Roosevelt made a quiet, almost secret, tour of shipyards and manufacturing plants on the West Coast in 1942. He toured the Vancouver plant.
If the aluminum company’s payroll was paltry compared to the Kaiser Shipyard’s, it would eventually claim a more prolonged effect financially and environmentally. The plant ran until 1986.
The site called a “Christmas present” turned into an environmental hazard in 1986. Chemical contaminants and metals seeped into the Columbia River. Washington worked with Alcoa to clean up the site. The Port of Vancouver bought the cleaned-up plot in 2008, turning it into Terminal 5.
Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.