She's a Grand Old Dam!
Cheesman Dam, the jewel of the Denver Water system, turned a hundred years old in 2006.
Just How Big Is Cheesman? When completed, it was the tallest dam in the world, towering 212 feet from the canyon bed up the cliffs to the spillway. At the base of the dam, it is barely wide enough for a two-lane blacktop –forty feet across from canyon side to canyon side– but it fills nearly 200 feet of the length of the streambed. From this long, narrow base it spreads upward like a lady's fan. At the top, it is wide and thin. The top is wider than the length of three football fields, but less than twenty feet across from water side to the huge sloped face. So the dam is ten times as thick at the bottom as at the top and thirty times as wide at the top as at the bottom. Half a million cubic feet of dirt and rock were excavated during the construction. Nearly three million cubic feet of masonry went into the resulting structure. With twenty-one thousand tons of newfangled Portland cement binding the stone, the dam weighs three hundred thousand tons. Filled to capacity, the reservoir holds nearly 80,000 acre feet of water, enough to provide a year's water to nearly half a million people, all by itself. |
Background
Cheesman Dam was conceived in the early 1890s to provide a water supply that would support the industrial and population growth of Denver. If Denver was to become a thriving city, it would need water, two hundred gallons a day for each citizen, still more for industry and electrical power. Denver was a city of around 100,000 people.
No water? No Denver. Water companies jockeyed for control of this precious commodity, and it became clear that a major reservoir would be needed.
It was also the era of Teddy Roosevelt, Frederick L. Olmsted, and John Muir. Roosevelt and Olmsted would begin creating the National Park Service. John Muir would found the Sierra Club.
The U.S. Forest Service and the Audubon Society are celebrating their centennials in 2005, along with Cheesman Dam. Cheesman Dam and Reservoir represent an early attempt to shape the environment to our needs without destroying its natural beauty. And what a success that effort was!
After a couple of false starts, the plan for Cheesman grew to visionary scope: It would be a 200-foot wonder that would hold 79,000 acre feet– enough water to fill a swimming pool extending from City Park to Alameda and from Colorado Blvd. to Broadway, ten feet deep.
It would be a hybrid dam, combining the best of two design types with innovative materials and methods. Its graceful curve would brace it against the massive weight of the water it contained. Master masons were brought in from the quarries of Italy to shape and fit a Pikes Peak granite surface over its massive bulk. Track was laid to speed delivery of materials.
Crews assembled deep in the mountains south of Denver, and construction began in the Platte Canyon. Work continued year-round, under the watchful eyes of contractor David Duff Seerie and his foremen. Slowly the wall rose, and the water rose with it. The growing lake was used to ferry stones from a quarry to the work site.
In response to the spirit of environmentalism
as it was understood in 1905,
Historic Landmark In 1973, Cheesman Dam was designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The society's announcement said, "Cheesman Dam is... of such historical significance and contemporary importance that is should never be forgotten, but placed side-by-side with other national and historical landmarks of the engineering profession." |
In May of 1905, water reached the spillway, and the future of Denver was bright.
More on Cheesman Dam and the Centennial
- Building a Landmark: Cheesman Dam
- Hayman Fire Reclamation
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