A silent film created by the Great Western Sugar Company for the purpose of recruiting Mexican nationals to come to Colorado to work in the beet fields, shot on black and white 16mm film with a home video camera. The film includes scenes of people working in the beet fields, playing on company baseball teams, […]
Many of Colorado’s Front Range towns began as agricultural colonies. Colonies were often semi-cooperative with a decidedly utopian bent, and they provided an instant community and planned infrastructure where people with like-minded values could settle. Present-day Fort Collins contains two former agricultural colony sites within its boundaries—the Mercer Colony and the Fort Collins Agricultural Colony.[1. […]
Since the 1890s, the Water Supply and Storage Company (WSSC) has become a large and imposing water delivery company in the Cache la Poudre River Valley. Its vast system of canals and reservoirs, acquired and built over the last century to irrigate fields, shape the landscape in and around Fort Collins. Yet the WSSC has not been […]
The North Poudre Irrigation Company began with a tumultuous and complicated early start as a conglomeration of multiple early irrigation companies along the Poudre River watershed. Despite the company’s low appropriation and decree ranking on the Poudre, North Poudre Irrigation Company (NPIC) had shrewd leaders who recognized the company’s potential. By buying up smaller, faltering […]
The Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company (LPIC) played a crucial role in Northern Colorado irrigation history despite its short lifespan. Both it and the related Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District (GPID) were fraught with logistical and financial struggles throughout their existence, but the irrigation infrastructure these organizations left behind remains an enduring legacy of the vision and hard work […]
A Sampling of Major Ditch Companies in Fort Collins: Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company North Poudre Irrigation Company Water Supply and Storage Company
In Colorado, citizens need a legal permission to remove water from a river for agricultural, municipal, recreational, or industrial use. Removing water from a river or aquifer “by means of a water structure such as a ditch, pipeline, boat chute, whitewater course, reservoir, or well,” is called a diversion.[1. Hobbs, Greg, Citizen’s Guide to Colorado […]
Moving water away from the Cache la Poudre River and into nearby fields requires a series of man-made conveyance channels. Structures that divert directly from the river are called canals or ditches. Most early irrigators in Colorado considered pumping water upward to be too expensive, and they diverted water at high points in valleys and […]
William C. Stover was born on July 11, 1841 in Virginia, and moved to Colorado in 1860 to ranch. Beginning in 1870, he operated a mercantile business with John C. Mathews, and then took over the firm himself until 1880. Stover served as a member of the Colorado Territorial legislature, and in 1876 helped draft […]
Burton Davis Sanborn was a long-time resident of Greeley, Colorado, who was very active in irrigation in Larimer County. Born on November 1, 1859, in Vermont, Sanborn came to Colorado as a child in 1870 with the original settlers of the Union Colony, and later in life served as secretary of the colony. Sanborn is […]