8/18/2009 3:36:00 PM Paradise Verde: The Verde Valley's past and future collide
Prosper Parker, a surveyor and contractor, designed a gravity irrigating system to bring Verde River water to north Phoenix
The Rio Verde Canal Company planned to build a 205,000-acre-foot dam and storage reservoir at the Horseshoe site, a diversion dam downstream near where Bartlett Dam is today, and 69 miles of canals to bring the irrigation to Paradise Valley.
They also envisioned a dam on New River to capture that stream's floodwaters along with excess water coming through the canal. From the New River dam, another 60 miles of canals would carry water west to another dam on the Hassayampa River.
CAMP VERDE - Embedded in the last step leading to the museum of the Camp Verde Historical Society is a three-inch diameter bronze disk.
Placed there in 1934 by the U. S. Geological Survey, it reads: Elevation above sea 3,146.608 feet.
Such elevation markers are typically reserved for peaks, passes and places of significant geographic interest.
Obviously, what in 1934 was the last step leading to the front door of the local grammar school, is neither peak nor pass. But not so obvious, and long forgotten, is the geographical significance the step and its small bronze disk once played.
At the time the disk was placed in wet cement, it represented a boundary both real and figurative, between all that had been and all that would remain for the 250-or-so families whose homes along the banks of the Verde River surrounded the village of Camp Verde.
In the real world, the disk marked the high water line for a proposed reservoir that would soon submerge most of the homes and ranches along a 15-mile stretch of the river.
Figuratively, it marked the boundary of what would and what would not disappear beneath the waters of a new Arizona - a state whose future was, and remains, dependent on an insatiable diet of a limited commodity -- water.
A dream, a scheme
The story of how the marker came to be embedded in the old schoolhouse steps began in the spring of 1889, with a scheme hatched by three men from Phoenix.
Attorney Augustus Sheldon, real estate developer Samuel Symonds and railroad construction contractor and surveyor Prosper Parker had an idea of irrigating land in Deer Valley and Paradise Valley, above the Arizona Canal, with water taken from the Verde River.
The ways and means for accomplishing their dream and the cast of characters who tenaciously tried to make it happen would change several times in the 45 years the dream was kept alive
And so would the mechanism for carrying out the plan. As first envisioned, it was a privately funded irrigation project. Then it was sold to investors and settlers alike as an agrarian Christian paradise blooming from the desert wasteland.
And finally it was sold to the federal government, Arizona politicians and thousands of unemployed workers as a relief project during the Great Depression.
The project's name would also change, starting with the Citrus Belt Canal Company, then to the Rio Verde Canal Company, the Verde Water and Power Company, the Paradise Verde Water Users Association, the Paradise Verde Irrigation District, and finally the Verde River Irrigation and Power District.
Initially the project sprouted like desert wildflowers after a spring rain. Organized as the Rio Verde Canal Company in 1891, with Sheldon at the helm, the company raised money by selling future water rights to settlers and investors.
By 1896, the company had completed a 715-foot tunnel at the present location of Horseshoe Dam (to divert water while a future dam was being built) along with 18 miles of canals running through the heart of Paradise and Deer valleys.
False start
Ultimately, the Rio Verde Canal Company planned to build a 205,000-acre-foot dam and storage reservoir at the Horseshoe site, a diversion dam downstream near where Bartlett Dam is today, and 69 miles of canals to bring the irrigation to Paradise Valley.
They also envisioned a dam on New River to capture that stream's floodwaters along with excess water coming through the canal. From the New River dam, another 60 miles of canals would carry water west to another dam on the Hassayampa River.
Along the 120-mile main artery, laterals would carry the project's lifeblood to thirsty farms and orchards, just like the farmers south of the Arizona Canal were already doing. Promotional literature boasted the project would irrigate 400,000 acres.
Shortly after the initial work was completed, the first of what would become a continuing history of setbacks began with a nationwide depression in the 1890s. Credit markets for irrigation projects dried up.
Around the turn of the century, the company reorganized as Verde Water and Power Company. They also secured the services of John Hudson, an "accomplished salesman as well as religious enthusiast" and a less than ethical entrepreneur.
Opposition
In July 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the National Reclamation Act. The federal government soon began withdrawing much of the land the company planned to use, including the Horseshoe dam site.
The government was making room for a new irrigation project that was competing for the same watershed. The Salt River Valley Water Users Association formed in 1903 to improve on the existing irrigation system that used water from the Salt River to irrigate lands below the Arizona Canal.
Questions of Verde River water rights also arose, as did a struggle over control of the river's floodwaters.
The Salt River farmers argued the Verde was an integral part of their watershed, to which they had senior rights.
Verde project supporters argued the river was a separate watershed with water rights independent of the main stream.
But both sides agreed that ultimate control of the Verde's water would depend on who built the first dam.
Hudson, now president of the Verde project, ran afoul of the Bureau of Reclamation as he continued to promote the project, even after the federal government had withdrawn the Horseshoe dam site and the state had withdrawn right of way for the canals.
Further inhibiting Verde Water and Power's ambitions was the fact that the many people working in the bureau had a vested interest in seeing the Salt River Project, its first western reclamation project, succeed.
New names, same game
In 1914, wishing to distance themselves from Hudson and, apparently, mimic their prosperous opponent, the landowners in Paradise Valley reorganized as the Paradise Verde Water Users Association.
In 1917, the Salt River Valley Water Users Association took full control of the Salt River Project from the Bureau of Reclamation and soon after escalated the fight by announcing its own plans to build a dam at Horseshoe.
The next year, as the two sides argued over their right to the Horseshoe dam site in a series of hearings conducted by the Bureau of Reclamation, the Verde water users changed their name yet again, this time to the Paradise Verde Irrigation District.
In 1920, after two years of hearings, Interior Secretary John Barton Payne announced that unless the two sides came to a settlement, he would award the Verde's floodwaters and storage rights to the Verde River Irrigation District - provided they could get financing within three years and build the dam at Horseshoe by 1926.
Payne's decision should have settled the matter, but once again fortune frowned on the residents of Paradise Valley.
Depressed agricultural prices scared potential investors. In 1923 the district asked for an extension and, for the last time, changed their name - this time to the Verde River Irrigation and Power District.
Change in plan
As the fight was escalating between the rival enterprises, the Paradise Valley landowners were also making dramatic changes to Sheldon, Symonds and Parker's original plan.
As their new name implied, they not only planned on irrigating lands in Paradise Valley, like Salt River Project, they also intended to generate electricity in an effort to defray costs.
They reduced the amount of acreage they planned to irrigate to what they deemed to be a conservative 85,000 acres.
And, after witnessing several drought cycles since the project was first designed, the district's engineers realized the reservoir at Horseshoe and the small diversion dam at Bartlett would not provide adequate storage for the project.
The new plan, one the Verde River Irrigation and Power District would eventually submit to the Bureau of Reclamation in an effort to secure public financing, called for a 378,000 acre-foot storage dam at the Bartlett site.
It also called for a 950,000-acre-foot storage reservoir and electric generating dam just upstream of the Verde River's confluence of Chasm Creek, 10 miles downstream from the village of Camp Verde.
As designed by the district's engineers, the Camp Verde Reservoir would snake some 15 miles upstream and cover some 14,000 acres on the surface, along with the homes, farms, ranches and dreams of those living in its way.
Part 2; Paradise Verde: Saved from an uncertain future, will appear in the Friday, Aug. 21 edition
