Page 14A
OREGON
East Oregonian
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Eastern Oregon ghost town lies underwater
By JAYSON JACOBY
Baker City Herald
BAKER CITY — The
series of black-and-white
photographs that scroll
across Gary Dielman’s
computer monitor tell the
story of a Baker County
town that disappeared 59
years ago.
But Robinette is nothing
like the county’s many other
ghost towns.
You can’t go there and
stand where its homes once
stood, or glimpse what
might have been the corner
of a foundation or touch the
shard of brick that was part
of a chimney.
Because Robinette is
underwater.
The place where parents
raised their families and
where kids ran through the
sagebrush and rode their
horses and hooked catfish
from the Snake River — all
of it lies more than 100
feet below the surface of
Brownlee Reservoir near
the mouth of the Powder
River.
Robinette was inundated
in 1958 when Idaho Power
Company’s Brownlee Dam
was finished and the Snake’s
water started to back up
behind the 420-foot high
earth-fill structure.
Robinette, which was
never incorporated, endured
almost until the water began
to rise, slowly but inexo-
rably, on the basalt walls of
Hells Canyon.
Robinette’s post office,
established on May 3, 1909,
closed on Nov. 29, 1957.
A little more than five
months later, in May 1958,
the Brownlee Dam’s gates
were closed.
The site of Robinette,
several miles upriver, soon
was gone.
Some of the town’s
buildings were moved — a
laborious process along the
narrow roads that connected
Robinette with Richland and
Halfway — and survive still.
But the pictorial history
of Robinette exists, and in
rich detail, mainly because
of one man and his affinity
0
Photo by Pete Basche/Baker County Library Historic Photo Collection
A view of Robinette looking south up the Snake River.
An electrical distribution facility is at the lower right.
LEFT: A self-portrait of Pete Basche, who documented
the town of Robinette, from the early 1950s.
for photography.
Pete Basche was born
on Nov. 23, 1913, at Home,
another
Baker
County
village — about 20 miles
upriver from Robinette —
that was also covered by
Brownlee Reservoir.
Home was near the mouth
of Connor Creek about 17
miles north of Huntington,
where Pete graduated from
high school in 1933.
Before he attended
Huntington High, Pete for
a time had to row a boat
across the Snake — then
still a free-flowing river,
subject to the vagaries of
rainstorms and spring snow-
melt — to Idaho, where he
was a student at the mining
town of Mineral.
After marrying Ernestine
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Halfway where he and his
brother, Bert, owned the
Halfway Grocery and Meat
Market.
In February 1942, Pete
and Ernestine moved to
Robinette. The town was
named for James Robinette,
who settled there in October
1887.
Over the next 15 years,
Pete was the Standard Oil
Co. fuel distributor, hauling
gasoline and diesel and
heating oil around Baker
County’s Panhandle. But
he also used his camera
to document life in one of
the more isolated towns in
Oregon.
Pete’s daughter, Betty
Basche, who was born
on Dec. 30, 1942, in the
family’s home at Robinette,
said her father “always had a
camera.”
“We didn’t go anywhere
without a camera,” Betty
said.
She said her father not
only enjoyed taking photo-
graphs, but he often read
magazine articles to learn
about the latest techniques
and the most advanced
equipment.
Pete’s
photographic
subjects
ranged
from
Christmas pageants at the
one-room, K-8 Robinette
school, to boat trips
down the Snake River’s
rapids, to family outings
in Hells Canyon or to
Anthony Lakes to escape
the canyon’s oppressive
summer heat.
In the last few years
before
Robinette
was
submerged, Pete focused
his lens most often on the
very project that doomed his
town — the construction of
Brownlee Dam.
He photographed the
multi-year process —it
started in 1955 — from the
ground on both the Oregon
and Idaho shores of the
Snake, from the steep slopes
above, and in several cases
from an airplane.
“That was his passion —
photography,” said Dielman,
who curates the Baker
County Library District’s
Historic Photo Collection, an
online archive that includes
almost 8,200 images.
The collection surpassed
the 8,000 threshold this
month when Dielman added
270 photos, most of them
taken by Pete during the
1950s while he was raising
his family at Robinette.
Pete, who moved to Rich-
land in 1957, died on July
17, 2004, at age 90.
The
Pete
Basche
Collection is included with
Gallery 6 on the online
collection, which is avail-
able at bakerlib.org. To get
to Pete’s photos, click on
Gallery 6, then either search
for “Basche” or click on the
Table of Contents and scroll
down to the start of the Pete
Basche Collection.
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