Posts Tagged ‘Sweetwater Dam’

Jubilation greeted the opening of the Sweetwater Dam in the spring of 1888. On the heels of the great land “boom of the eighties,” National City and the south bay reveled in the completion of an engineering marvel, the tallest masonry arch dam in the United States, which created San Diego County’s first large reservoir of water–an essential key to the region’s growth and prosperity.

The story of Building the Sweetwater Dam.

The city council signed a contract yesterday with Hatfield, the Moisture Accelerator. He has promised to fill Morena reservoir to overflowing by December 20, 1916, for $10,000. All the councilmen are in favor of the contract except Fay, who says it’s rank foolishness.  —San Diego Union.

By the end of 1915, San Diego was in its fifth year of drought.  The city reservoirs of Morena and Otay were nearly empty.  With water supplies threatened, the nervous City Councilmen gave verbal acceptance to the offer of a “Rainmaker,” Charles M. Hatfield, who boldly pledged to “fill the Morena reservoir to overflowing . . .”

Read the story of The Rainmaker

Mission Valley, flooded in January 1916.