Irrigation companies and irrigation districts are two types of entities which distribute water in Colorado. People sometimes confuse the two. Both companies and districts own water rights and distribute water, but the two are very different in structure. Mutual Ditch Companies Reservoir Companies Irrigation Districts Private, voluntary Water allocated by share Length of ditches and […]

Early travelers through the area marveled at its crystal clear waters, abundance of trout, adjacent green pastures, and dramatic rock formations in the canyon. The Cache la Poudre River’s abundance attracted many others who settled in the valley and constructed farms and towns. To combat aridity, they also dug irrigation ditches and diverted water from […]

Although the Fort Collins irrigation system originated as an agricultural endeavor, it has evolved to include service for the demands of municipal and industrial water users. The city’s urban population diverted the Cache la Poudre River’s water as soon as they founded Fort Collins in the 1870s. Urban water needs—daily use and consumption in homes […]

For the last hundred years, residents of Larimer County and Fort Collins have been transferring water from agricultural to urban uses. However, without farms and ranches, Fort Collins’ development into a city of 148,000 people today might never have come to be, and agriculture would not have been possible around Fort Collins without irrigation. The […]

  Residents of the Cache la Poudre River Valley have been diverting water from the river for more than 150 years, and they have been transferring and litigating rights to use that water the entire time. Colorado’s prior appropriation laws, established in the 1860s, produced a legal framework that both facilitated and complicated transfers between […]

Poudre History Maps The Arthur Ditch Living in an Irrigated City Poudre History StoryMap

Historians at Colorado State University’s Public Lands History Center created this website to explore the history of human use of the Cache la Poudre River during the last 150 years, using Fort Collins as a case study. The Cache la Poudre River originates in the Rocky Mountains and flows through Larimer and Weld Counties in […]

  National Border, National Park: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument This website is the product of a one-semester senior seminar taught in spring 2012 by PLHC Council Member Dr. Jared Orsi at Colorado State University.  The objective of the course was for the class’s eighteen senior history majors to master historical research, writing, and editing […]