Photograph of Owyhee Dam — Photograph by US Bureau of Reclamation, Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Owyhee Dam Historic District

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.

From the record

“Owyhee Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Owyhee River in Eastern Oregon near Adrian, Oregon, United States. Completed in 1932 during the Great Depression, the dam generates electricity and provides irrigation water for several irrigation districts in Oregon and neighboring Idaho.”
Wikipedia article Owyhee Dam, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 19 National Register listings published here for Malheur County · listed in 2010 · category: District.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

Address. Owyhee Lake Rd; 11 mi SW of Adrian, Adrian, 97913
When was it listed? September 2010
Category. district
Census division. Juntura
National Register reference number. 10000791 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Fires near this property

33 since 1992

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 33 fires within 5 miles of Owyhee Dam Historic District between 1992 and 2019, burning about 49,489 acres in total. 12 started naturally. 7 were recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Natural	12
Arson/incendiarism	7
Smoking	4
Recreation and ceremony	3
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	3
Power generation/transmission/distribution	2
Fireworks	1
Equipment and vehicle use	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
25 September 1995	Power generation/transmission/distribution	4.0 acres	Vale District	LWR OWYHEE
14 September 1997	Power generation/transmission/distribution	100 acres	Vale District	BLK WLW
4 August 1993	Natural	under an acre	Vale District	OWYHEE D
26 August 1995	Smoking	1.0 acres	Vale District	OWYHEE DAM
17 August 1996	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	1.0 acres	Vale District	BIRCH
13 August 2000	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	1.0 acres	Vale District	OWYHEE DAM
1 August 1994	Natural	under an acre	Vale District	GORDONGULC
5 July 2006	Natural	52 acres	Vale District	RESORT

Every fire recorded in Malheur County

Mines and quarries near this property

10 of 11 shown

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists 11 workings within 5 miles of Owyhee Dam Historic District: 5 occurrences, 3 past producers, 1 prospect, 1 producer. 1 still produces. What was taken out: Gold, Gemstone, Stone, Geothermal. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Site	Commodity	Status
Rice-Bacon Tuff	Stone	Past Producer
Rice-Bacon Tuff	Stone, Dimension	Unknown
South Black Willow Spring	Geothermal	Occurrence
Haystack Butte Claims	Gemstone	Past Producer
Haystack Butte Claims	Gemstone	Producer
Gold Prospect	Gold	Occurrence
Grassy Mountian Regional	Gold	Occurrence
Lucky G	Gold	Past Producer
Lucky G	Gold	Prospect
Unnamed Prosect	Gold	Occurrence

Every working recorded in Malheur County

Storms near this property

3 since 1997

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Adrian, the town this property stands in, in 3 storm reports between 1997 and 2017: 2 thunderstorm wind, 1 flash flood. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
July 2017	Thunderstorm Wind	Adrian	-	A post on Facebook reported that a 25 feet tall Russian olive tree was downed by thunderstorm outflow winds. The tree had a 2 part trunk with the larger being about 34 inches in diameter.
June 2004	Thunderstorm Wind	Adrian	-	see narrative for Idaho this date.
September 1997	Flash Flood	Adrian	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Malheur County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 10000791 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Malheur County	All 19 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.