Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 067-2 - April 2013 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 6 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2014-03-26 08:27:36 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:06:32 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:06:32

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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NCHS Bulletin April 2013 PWA, SRA, WPA and NID Partner in Nevada County by Maria E. Brower Te GREAT DEPRESSION IN AMERICA LEFT AT LEAST a quarter of the workforce unemployed. With the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, the government’s response to those that were hungry and out of work was an explosion of quick and massive legislation. The President promised relief, recovery and reform. Collectively this legislation became known as the New Deal. Its purposes were to stimulate the economy, preserve the skills and self-respect of unemployed persons by providing them useful work. The programs and agencies created under Roosevelt’s administration became known as the alphabet agencies due to the use of acronyms for the many agencies. The best known was the WPA (Works Progress Administration.) A competing agency was the PWA (Public Works Administration) that offered loans and grants for much-needed construction projects. The benefits to individual communities and the nation can still be seen today. In 1928 the Nevada Irrigation District (NID) had built a dam above Nevada City on Deer Creek to create Lower Scotts Flat Reservoir. Ten years later, in 1938, the NID board of directors applied to the PWA for a loan and a grant for the purpose of clearing the site for a second reservoir upstream from Lower Scotts Flat Reservoir, and to build a tunnel and canal for delivery of water from the dam. A new reservoir would not only increase NID’s annual income and help the district pay back a loan from Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), but it would also lessen a weakness in water security and protect against inter+. ™“ 4 ~ +: , MB NID workers clearing snow from a blocked flume on the Cascade Canal. (Nevada Irrigation District photo.) ruptions to domestic and industrial water users. All major water storage at that time was located in the High Sierra at a distance of 30 to 50 miles from principal points of distribution. Canals, flumes, and tunnels that had to be kept clear and in good repair were subject to damage from snow, fire and caving. A few weeks earlier, an unexpected canal slide near Little Tunnel, a unit of the PG&E. system was a wakeup call for the Nevada County. Scotts Flat Reservoir was to be an earth-filled dam 130 feet high on Deer Creek with 20,000 acre feet of water storage. Another probable use for this expanded storage would be the development of the Harmony Ridge district along the Tahoe-Ukiah highway (today’s Highway 20), where scarcity of water had inhibited home building. It would be possible to extend a canal over the ridge to Blue Tent area, where considerable potential for mining still existed in a once-rich area. An election was scheduled for September 28, 1938, to “decide whether or not NID should enter into a contract with the Federal Emergency Public Works Administration (PWA) for a grant of $207,000 and a loan of $153,000—or a grant only of $207,000. Although voter approval is not usually required for NID projects, in this case it was needed as a condition to obtaining WPA grants and loans. William Durbrow, manager for NID, sent a letter to landowners and voters of the district to persuade them of the benefits to both users and NID. His appeal was followed by an editorial in The Union newspaper that outlined the project and the benefits to the county, and urged voters to vote for the proposed project. Scotts Flat dam and reservoir would cost $400,000 and replace water that was currently purchased from PG&E for approximately $15,000 per year. The voters of the Nevada County Irrigation District voted in excess of 21 to . in favor of the contract—the total vote was 497 for and 27 against. At the end of October, even though financing was still undetermined, work had already started to build a road to the dam site, and preparations were being made to establish a camp to house the crews who would be clearing the site. Before the end of 1938 a semi-permanent camp for the relief and care of 200 men and an additional ten administrators was up and running, due to an emergency caused by severe storms and cold in early November that closed a similar camp near Cisco and made it necessary to move all workers to a lower altitude. At the Scott’s Flat site the newly relocated men cleared a heavy stand of timber and brush in connection with the prospective dam that had been calculated to take at least two years to complete. The cooperative efforts of R.S. Smiley, construction engineer with the California State Relief Agency (SRA), and