02.21.07
Ditch Diggers
After Visalia, Grangeville may have been the first town in the Sink. It was a stage stop between Visalia and Stockton, and a center of industry—one might say, as the irrigation systems that make the Central Valley what it is today were just beginning. Even the famous naturalist John Muir had stopped in Grangeville to admire the innovative network of canals in 1875, when Grangeville was booming with a population of 600. That was before the Southern Pacific Railroad bypassed Grangeville and thereby doomed it to obscurity.
Before irrigation and other initiatives, the Grangeville area was a harsh place to farm. Salinity, dust storms, and wild cattle and pigs made for unending frustration. The Last Chance and Peoples’ Ditch Companies were formed in 1873 to bring Kings River water to the Grangeville area, and the town itself was organized in 1874.
We lived in the town that the Southern Pacific Railroad created just east of Grangeville. That railroad town would be named Hanford, though there was nothing to ford at Hanford but the Peoples Ditch and the Southern Pacific.
I was given a tour of the canal system one summer when my older brother Al came to Hanford for a visit after returning from Alaska. He purchased an inflatable raft, and invited me on an expedition down the River from Laton to Excelsior Avenue.
As we floated downstream, the river began to look less and less like a river, and more like a canal. Just after we passed what I later determined was the Lower Kings River Ditch diversion, our way was obstructed by a dam on the river—and just by a lucky chance—an angry farmer. Al had to pull the raft out of the river and carry it down a dirt road to a point downstream where we could get back in the water. We finally reached Excelsior Avenue, where Al’s wife Sanna picked us up.
© 2007, 2008 Dan J. Jensen
