Atlas of Drowned Towns Team Wins 2025 RM-CESU Group Student Award

A team of Boise State University graduate students has been honored with the 2025 RM-CESU Group Student Award. The recognition celebrates their work on The Atlas of Drowned Towns, a public-facing digital history project that documents communities displaced by dam construction across Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Developed in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the project blends environmental history, storytelling, and community collaboration to recover the human stories behind the state’s mid-century river development.

The Atlas combines an interactive map with archival materials, interpretive essays, and oral histories. Through “History Jamborees”—two-day community events held in towns surrounding the displaced towns—team members invited residents and descendants to share photographs, letters, and memories. The materials were scanned on site and added to the Atlas’s online archive, preserving them digitally while allowing families to keep their originals. The result is a living, evolving record of both place and memory—one that connects personal stories to the larger story of river management in the American West.

This award honors seven of the student participants who worked on the project over its three-year history. Rachel Klade helped launch the project’s web platform and coordinated its first two community History Jamborees, managing logistics and outreach. Jack Warner led the development of technical tools such as 3D artifact scanning. Rebecca Mills conducted in-depth archival research and wrote interpretive stories about individual “drowned towns.” Nate Muir synthesized archival and legal materials to provide context for community relocations. Alycia Hansen refined the team’s oral history methods, while McKenna Schmitt expanded the Atlas’s reach through public programming and social media. 

To learn more about the project’s impact, RM-CESU spoke with two team members—Rachel Klade and Rebecca Mills—for a closer look at their experiences and insights.

For Rachel Klade, who joined the project in early 2023 as a graduate assistant, the Atlas became a model for how public history can be participatory and community-driven. She helped establish the project’s digital archive while organizing its first in-person collection events, which she describes as feeling like “reunions” for the people who once lived in the affected communities. Rachel says the work deepened her understanding of shared authority in public history—making sure that those who lived these experiences have a voice in how their histories are told. Now the Public Programs Specialist at the Idaho State Museum, she says the project continues to influence her approach: “It taught me to remember the human side of every story—to see history not as distant or abstract, but as lived experience that shapes people’s sense of place.”

Rebecca Mills joined the project from a different starting point. Trained as a historian of the American Revolution, she pivoted into environmental history through a graduate research assistantship and quickly discovered her passion for uncovering local stories hidden beneath reservoirs. Her work focused on the Detroit Dam and the community of Old Detroit, which was displaced when the area was flooded in the 1950s. She wrote narrative profiles of these lost places, balancing technical achievement with human cost. Rebecca says her time on the Atlas taught her to make history accessible to a public audience and to ask harder questions about what progress means. “It’s not enough to celebrate infrastructure,” she explained. “You have to ask who pays the price—and what gets remembered when a town disappears.”

For the Boise State team, The Atlas of Drowned Towns is more than a research project—it’s a reminder that history can guide better decisions today. By documenting the lived experiences of displaced communities, the students are helping managers and policymakers see beyond maps and engineering diagrams to the people whose lives were changed by those projects. Their work embodies the RM-CESU’s mission to connect science, culture, and community, showing that the most meaningful progress happens when every story is brought back to the surface.