‘A wild-eyed bunch’: Moses Lake and the Columbia Basin Project

Homes spring up in Moses Lake in 1956.
COURTESY PHOTO/MOSES LAKE MUSEUM & ART CENTER

Longview Elementary School in 1957.
COURTESY PHOTO/MOSES LAKE MUSEUM & ART CENTER

by Dollie Boyd/Moses Lake Museum & Art Center//Contributed Report
| November 2, 2026 3:05 AM

No event in the history of the Columbia Basin reshaped our town as deeply as the arrival of irrigation and the rapid development it triggered. Before the Columbia Basin Project, Moses Lake was a modest lakeshore settlement of just a few hundred people. Already impacted by the arrival of the Army in 1944, we experienced even more dramatic and immediate change thanks to the Columbia Basin Project, growth so intense that people across the state and nation took notice.

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