History

Bridgeport is a town that has made it through hard times before. Cycles of boom and bust began with the gold strikes of the 1880s, when Bridgeport was known as Westfield. Chinese immigrants set up mining camps in the area to sluice gold from the banks of the Columbia.

As the gold ran dry, many residents turned to agriculture for their livings. Horses and cattle thrived on the wild bunch grasses, fruit production began to take root, and the fertile plateaus above the town supported wheat fields, which in turn supplied the local flour mill which shipped its output down the Columbia by steamboat.

In 1892, the town was renamed Bridgeport when a development company from Bridgeport, Conn., purchased the town site for $60,000. By the time the town was incorporated in 1910, its population had grown to 500 and its business district was flourishing with a bank, a flour mill and a saw mill, three general stores, two butcher shops, a ferry operation and the largest hotel between Seattle and Spokane, just to name a few ventures.

The Great Depression of the 1920s took its toll on Bridgeport as it had the rest of the country, and much of the commercial district disappeared. Fortune turned again for Bridgeport,, in 1949, when construction began on Chief Joseph Dam, one mile east of the city. Bridgeport’s population waxed and waned through three separate phases of construction on the dam, the last of which was completed in 1980. Today, Chief Joseph Dam, which is owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is the second largest hydropower producer in the United States, generating in excess of $200 million in power annually, or enough to supply the electrical needs of more than 1.5 million people.