The Wright Act and the Water That Changed Everything

Before the irrigation districts arrived, Modesto's farmers grew wheat. Dry wheat, on dry land, under the assumption that the San Joaquin Valley was essentially a semi-arid plain suited to grain and cattle and not much else. The farms were large, the yields were variable, and the land was worth what the rainfall decided it was worth.

Then a former schoolteacher from La Grange named C. C. Wright got himself elected to the California state assembly on a single-issue platform. His issue was irrigation law. The act he steered through the legislature in eighteen eighty-seven allowed California communities to organize themselves into irrigation districts with the power to issue bonds, condemn land for canals, and assert water rights collectively. It was the first legislation of its kind in the United States.

The Modesto Irrigation District was the second district formed under the Wright Act, organized in July of eighteen eighty-seven. The voters within the proposed district boundaries approved it by a substantial margin. A determined group of landowners challenged the district's taxing authority and its right to exist all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The Court sided with the district in eighteen ninety-eight.

The LaGrange Dam went up on the Tuolumne River, completed in eighteen ninety-three. Water moved through canals to fields that had previously relied on rain. The crop mix transformed within a decade. Wheat gave way to alfalfa for dairy cattle. Alfalfa gave way to orchards. Almonds, apricots, and peaches replaced the grain fields. Land that had sold for a few dollars an acre before irrigation sold for five to ten times that amount after the water arrived.

What the Modesto Irrigation District built in those early years is still the infrastructure that delivers water to the city today. The Wright Act was eventually adopted as a model by irrigation districts across the American West. It began here, on the Tuolumne, because a schoolteacher from La Grange believed that collective water rights were the only way the valley would work.