What the Salt River Project (SRP) in Arizona was, and is


Every month I give some money to the nice people at SRP. They are kind enough to supply me with electricity so that I can have air conditioning. Thank you, SRP! I'm looking at one of my bills now, and it just says SRP. But to me, it will always be the Salt River Project.

If you understand the Salt River Project, it answers many questions about why a city like Phoenix sits out in the middle of the desert, and has done so well. And to do that, you have to do a little traveling, and a little time-traveling.

If you live in the Phoenix area, and think that the Salt River is that big empty area that goes past the freeway, think again. Phoenix does live along the banks of a flowing river, it's just that its course has just been changed, and used for water and power.

Start with the Roosevelt Dam, which is northeast of Apache Junction. If you're really adventurous, drive there along the Apache Trail. If you do, it will really give you a clear picture of how absolutely ridiculous the idea of using the water from this river to irrigate the valley was. But in 1911, there were a lot of hair-brained schemes. This one worked!

Personally, I like the humility of the people who called what they were doing a “project”. You know, something to work on for a while, to see if it worked. But the project goes way back before then. The course of the Salt River had been re-routed by people in the valley for thousands of years. If you visited Pueblo Grande in school and didn't pay much attention, go visit it again. And you should be asking, “what in the world were these people thinking?” I call this kind of stuff “unrealistic optimism".

In the 1860s, a group of ex-confederate soldiers, led by a guy named Jack Swilling, started digging the modern canals. And somehow, he was able to raise the money to get it done. Can you imagine? Stand out in the middle of the desert today, miles from anything, and ask yourself if you would have invested? Or started digging? Now that is one big project!

Phoenix was built along the Salt River, and you can still see it flowing, every day. It's in the canals. And if you look at the old SRP logo you can see how the Salt River not only provided water, it provided power, and it still does. Thank you, SRP!


If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

  1. bbrownMarch 30, 2016 at 4:42 AM

    It was, originally, the Salt River Valley Water Users Association.

    http://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix/AZ100/1900/salt_river.html

    Love the "Goverment sheep."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more