Two Sides of the River: Salt River Valley Canals, 1867-1902

Summary

Now, and into the foreseeable future, most water brought into the Salt River Valley, home to Phoenix — the nation’s sixth most populous city in 2017 — and other growing communities, is used for urban purposes.

To the visionaries who passed this desert area in the 1800s, their predictions of a future metropolis were more than fulfilled. The most significant event in the transformation from desert to home to America’s 12th-largest metropolitan area with more than 4.5 million people was the construction of Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in the early 1900s.1 The water storage dam, managed by the Salt River Project (SRP) since 1917, was needed to enable irrigation of more land than could be farmed with the natural flow of the Salt River, which passes from east to west through the Valley in south-central Arizona.

Shortly before passage of the National Irrigation Act of June 17, 1902, by the U.S. Congress to permit federal assistance in land reclamation, approximately 113,000 acres (176.5 square miles) of Valley land was irrigated. To reimburse the federal government for building Roosevelt Dam, the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association (one of two organizations making up today’s Salt River Project) was incorporated Feb. 7, 1903.

In 1914, three years after completion and dedication of the dam, 219,690 acres within the Association’s boundaries was irrigated with the Salt River’s natural flow and water stored by the dam. With construction of additional dams on the Salt River and its tributary, the Verde River, more than 96% of the land — 229,940 acres — was in agricultural production in 1952 (another 8,460 acres was considered urban, for a total of 238,400 acres, or 372.5 square miles).

At that time, with a post-World War II surge in population, SRP signed a contract with Phoenix and the U.S. Department of the Interior allowing the city to use SRP irrigation water for municipal purposes. Today the amount of land remaining in agricultural production inside the Association’s borders is about 9% (20,694 acres).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Salt River Project Digital Library

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