Local Reservoirs

Several reservoirs are located near Preston: Johnson Reservoir, Foster Reservoir, Lamont Reservoir, Glendale Reservoir, Condie Reservoir, Oneida Narrows, Oxford Reservoir, Strong Arm Reservoir, Treasureton Reservoir, Twin Lakes Reservoir and Winder Reservoir.

As long as one is careful to protect those waters from invasive species, there’s fishing, swimming, rock skipping, camping, boating, and a host of entertaining activities to do there. And, the life-sustaining waters stored in these artificial lakes are one of the most valuable gifts the area’s founders gave to Franklin County’s current residents.
Finding a way to get water from where it was naturally, to where they wanted to grow crops was the first order of business for those pioneers. But not for the economic impact the above-mentioned activities generate in local businesses. The value was agricultural.

The water those reservoirs hold tamed the land around them. For example, water turned a sand-blown area known as Poverty Flats into the lush fields surrounding Preston.

“Without the reservoirs, the county would be totally different – there wouldn’t be a fraction of the land that would produce (crops),” said Lyle Porter of the Consolidated Water Company.

Lots of elbow grease and horsepower went into a system of canals that crisscross the county in order to get that water to those parched patches of land. Three and four generations ago, people were intent on improving their community. They hitched up as many as eight horses to steel scraping apparatuses called fresnos and pulled them across ground broken up by plows, pick axes, and crowbars to create canal beds.
Both men and women worked long days constructing those canals. Recently widowed with two small boys to provide for, Veroka Goodsell Gill found a job cooking for the men working on the West Cache Canal Company in Linrose, over a century ago. Lillie Adams Howell did the same for men working on the canal system that brings water from springs in Mink Creek to the county’s western border, filling the Twin Lakes. That was also a century ago.

The first reservoir built in the county was Johnson Reservoir, said Porter. It was a private affair, constructed by Bill Head to irrigate the near the creek that fed his fields. But its location was considered beneficial to many more farms, so the dam was raised, additional water diverted from Cub River into it and Lamont Reservoir, and the water divvied up by a group of share-holders, said Porter.

The first canal was dug in Franklin in 1860, the year pioneers first settled there. It brought water from Spring Creek into the fort there.

Sugar beets prompted the construction of one of the county’s largest reservoirs: Glendale, said Porter. As a sugar beet grows, its need for water increases at the end of its growing season, which is also when local reservoirs had just about been drained to irrigate earlier maturing crops, like alfalfa.

So next time you jump from a dock to swim, cast a line hoping to snag a big fish, or slip on a water ski, remember the backbreaking effort made by those pioneers as they worried about how to make this part of the western desert blossom like a rose for their descendants.