Everyone living in Carbondale is familiar with the Town’s extensive, gravity-fed irrigation system, comprising eight miles of open ditches and underground culverts that carry water diverted from the Crystal and Roaring Fork rivers between May and October. But the history of this ingenious system isn’t well-known.
When homesteaders began settling here in the 1880s, they dug irrigation canals by hand, using pickaxes and shovels, to bring water to their farms. William Dinkel, one of the area’s early settlers, wrote in his autobiography:
In the summer of 1882 I built the first irrigation ditch out of the Roaring Fork River. Since I had no surveying instruments, I established grade by watching the flowing water and correcting the slope.
By the early 1900s, large agricultural operations around Carbondale required major irrigation projects. William Dinkel, now a wealthy entrepreneur, and his partners, Fate Girdner and Frank Sweet, owned the Big Four Ranch on the east mesa, where they produced cattle and potatoes for the Dinkel Mercantile Company. Sweet was in charge of constructing the 11-mile canal required to bring water from the Crystal River, at a cost of $25,000, equivalent to about one million dollars today.
After Sweet sold his interest in the Big Four, he bought land on the west mesa with the idea of growing 2,000 acres of seed potatoes to sell to local farmers. Edna Sweet wrote in her book, “Carbondale Pioneers 1879-1890,” that her husband Frank partnered up with Lou Sweet (no relation) and Henry Clay Jessup to build the irrigation system necessary for his operation:
It was a much bigger proposition in ditch building, involving some 2,000 acres, so [Frank] formed a company known as the Sweet-Jessup Canal Company… It took three years to complete the 19 miles of ditch… and after the water was turned in, it ran the entire length of the canal to the great dry mesa waiting to drink it up.
It took $50,000 to complete the Sweet-Jessup Canal, which brought success to Frank Sweet’s Crystal River Ranch and is still irrigating the cattle-grazing land there now.
Legislation regarding water use developed with settler expansion in Colorado. Water rights belonged to the first person to divert water from a stream or river, and they retained those rights over anyone who came later, creating a hierarchy of senior and junior water rights known as the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation.
Local ditch associations were formed to maintain the system, and users pay an annual fee to draw water from their respective ditches. Notably, the Carbondale Utilities Department, which administers the Town Ditch and the Weaver Ditch, doesn’t charge their users.
Though irrigation needs were taken care of, there was no indoor plumbing for the first 23 years after Carbondale’s founding in 1888. Potable water was delivered to residents in a wooden tank carried by a horse-drawn wagon. The water was fed into underground holding tanks called cisterns, then drawn out with buckets for daily use.
That changed in the first decade of the 20th century, as described in “The History of Carbondale” written by the Carbondale Study Club in the 1960s:
Town leaders commissioned a survey to find a pure, clean source for a municipal water supply. It was therefore determined that a spring on Nettle Creek, on the north side of Mount Sopris about eight miles south of town, was the ideal choice.
In 1910, the first load of pipe for the new water line was delivered. The pipe was made of wooden slats, one-inch thick, four inches wide and about 10-feet long, formed in a circle and wrapped with a spiral of heavy wire. The pipe sections resembled a long narrow barrel with an inside diameter of eight inches. When water passed through the pipe, the wood swelled and made a tight seal. In 1911, the water line was turned on at the Nettle Creek spring, and Carbondale households finally enjoyed the benefits of indoor plumbing.
The wood pipes and fittings required constant repair and sometimes failed catastrophically, cutting off the town’s water supply. So, in 1923, the whole system was replaced with six-inch galvanized pipe. Around 1964, the water line was replaced with ten-inch steel pipe.
By 1975, the demand for municipal water had risen significantly, prompting the construction of a well near the Crystal River, south of town. Another well was later constructed near the Roaring Fork River. Between the wells and Nettle Creek, Carbondale’s waterworks currently serves around 2,300 households.
In 2018, severe drought affected the town’s ditch irrigation system. We received an emergency substitute water-supply plan from the state, allowing for a temporary change on another ditch, from agricultural to municipal use, so that town ditches could receive enough water to irrigate parks, schools and residential yards.
As the drought years continue to pile up, the Town of Carbondale is taking measures to address future water shortages, like installing automated gate systems that monitor stream volume and adjust flow.
Considering the predictions of worsening drought in the next several decades, water conservation in our homes and yards should also be a top priority for Carbondale’s residents.