The Sun

GATUN VILLAGE NEARLY GONE.

Last Traces of the Famous Isthmian Settlement Being Wiped Out.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13.—The Isthmian Canal Commission has received a report saying that the last traces of the village of Gatun, Panama, as it existed when the Americans went to the isthmus in 1904 are being wiped out to make room for the Gatun dam. The office building along the old line of the Panama Railroad was razed about the middle of July by the laborers who are stripping the ground in advance of the hydraulic fill, and the water in the fill is rapidly rising toward the houses in the negro settlement between the storage piles and the old railroad station.

This hamlet is within the limits of the dam and its site will be covered. As the old village disappears the new Gatun on the hills overlooking the site of the dam and locks grows larger. It is now one of the largest settlements in the Canal Zone. The native village of Gatun was on a peninsula formed by a big loop which the Chagres River made at that place. It was a well known landing place for boats navigating the Chagres.

At the time the surveys were made for the Harrison map the village was protected by a fort on the hill that rises to 120 feet above sea level just south of the spillway of Gatun dam. On the Panama Railroad map published in 1855 Gatun is shown as a hamlet of about a hundred houses. The railroad station and a few shacks alongside it had also been erected at that time on the east bank of the river.