The ditches and the decree

The Provo Bench, where Orem now stands, was sagebrush and rock when the first settlers looked at it. Before anyone dug, Brigham Young asked Jesse Fox, surveyor general of Utah Territory, to judge whether the Provo River could water it. Fox reported the river "full and free of claims." In 1862 landowners organized the Provo Bench irrigation company and started a canal from the mouth of Provo Canyon southwest along the east edge of the bench, to end just above what is now 400 South in Orem.

They built it with mules and homemade tools, plowing a furrow from the river toward the bench and widening and deepening it as the water soaked the ground. Some men worked off their road tax by digging. The finished ditch, completed in the mid 1860s, was only about 2 feet deep and 6 feet wide, but it first watered 2,000 acres and, once enlarged, 4,000. Land on the bench rose in value from $1.25 to $2.00 an acre. More ditches branched from it, among them the North Union Canal, which carried Provo Bench water more than nine miles north through Orem, Lindon and Pleasant Grove.

Ditches on the bottoms

Below the bench, closer to the lake, the low ground along the Provo River needed its own channels. In 1873, according to a plaque in Provo's Lions Park, settlers built the Lake Bottom Irrigation Canal, which takes water seasonally from the Provo River and draws on springs that feed Spring Creek year round. The park sits at 1280 North 950 West, in northwest Provo, on the low ground toward the lake. In 1878 the Timpanogos Canal Company formed to carry river water to the northeastern edge of Provo, and it has run its canal without a break ever since.

Another canal came out of a merger. In about 1897 stockholders of the Enterprise Canal Company and the Union Irrigation Company formed the West Union Canal Company. Its canal left the Provo River just below the mouth of the canyon and ran west about 10 miles to Utah Lake, past a landmark called Carter's point about 3 miles out and on to a series of laterals. Smaller groups of neighbors took their water from those laterals. One of them, the Smith Ditch Company, was not even incorporated; it was a voluntary association of farmers who owned the ditch together as tenants in common.

Sharing a canal meant sharing its upkeep, and that bred lawsuits. The West Union company sued Thomas Thornley, a Smith Ditch member whose three shares in the ditch counted as nine in the canal company, for his share of maintaining the canal all the way to the lake. Thornley argued he owed only for the stretch that actually reached his lateral. In 1924 the Utah Supreme Court sided with him, holding that the parties' own contract governed what each user owed.

Provo Reservoir Company v. Provo City

The biggest fight was over the river itself. As canals multiplied up and down the Provo, from Kamas, Heber and Midway in the mountains to the lake bottoms, nobody could say with certainty whose water was whose. The Provo Reservoir Company, which stored water in a reservoir near the head of the Provo River and released it into the river in late June, sued Provo City and dozens of other users, from canal companies and woolen mills to individual farmers. The case came to trial on June 6, 1916, before Judge C. W. Morse of the Fourth District Court, and his decree, issued in 1921, became the Provo River's rulebook.

The decree split the river into a Provo Division and a Wasatch Division and ranked every right by the date it was first used. The oldest, Class A in the Provo Division, covered water put to use before May 12, 1903. Each right was measured in second feet, a flow of one cubic foot per second, with a duty setting how many acres each second foot had to serve. Defendants who never answered the suit were declared to have "no right, title or interest whatsoever" in the river.

The Class A list reads like a map of the old farms. The Provo Bench Canal and Irrigation Company received rights for 4,332.53 acres. The Upper East Union Irrigation Company got 744.9 acres, the Timpanogos Canal Company 847 and the Lake Bottom Canal Company 1,196. The West Union Canal Company and the members of the Smith Ditch Company shared rights for 1,820 acres, and the Smith Ditch roll included Penrods, Carters, Baums, Thomas Thornley and William Gammon, whose family had farmed near the river mouth since the 1850s.

Industry was on the list too. The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company won rights through the Lake Bottom Canal for 54 acres, plus 5 second feet from Spring Creek and the river from mid September to mid January for the sugar beet slicing plant on its own land nearby. Even single springs were parceled out. Water rising in three springs near the Lake View depot went to the Madsen Ditch, with 60 acres for Charles A. Madsen and 40 for Edwin Madsen.

Deer Creek and the drought

The decree divided the water but could not make more of it. The Provo Reservoir Company also owned a canal, built in the early 1900s by the Utah Lake Irrigation Company under Joseph R. Murdock and later called the Murdock Canal, that carried river water from the canyon mouth north to Lehi. Then came drought. Between 1931 and 1935 the water stored in Utah Lake fell from 850,000 acre feet to 20,000, and Salt Lake City faced its own shortage.

The answer was the federal Provo River Project, sponsored by Salt Lake City, Provo, five other Utah County towns and irrigation interests. Approved in 1935, it began construction in May 1938 and delivered its first water in 1941, when Deer Creek Dam was finished about 16 miles northeast of Provo. The reservoir behind it stored Provo River floods along with water brought over from the Weber River by canal and from the Duchesne River by tunnel. In 1940 the government bought the Murdock Canal from the Provo Reservoir Company to enlarge it, and work on the aqueduct to Salt Lake City ran from 1939 to 1951.

Deer Creek arrived just in time for the steel mill on Vineyard's fields. Geneva Steel drew water from Deer Creek Reservoir and from artesian wells on its own site, and the farms whose ditches had once divided the river gave way to the plant.

The old system is now being sealed up. The Timpanogos canal, once an open clay lined ditch, is piped nearly its whole length. The Murdock Canal was enclosed in steel pipe between 2010 and 2012 at a cost of about $150 million, and a 17 mile trail now runs on top of it. In 2023 Lindon began work to shift its canal shares to the Provo River Aqueduct, while the open ditches of the Provo Bench and North Union companies were already carrying about 75 percent less water than before. More than 160 years after the first furrow, the decree's numbered rights still decide who gets the river.