Derby Dam: America's First Federal Irrigation Project
Near Reno, Nevada
The squat concrete structure ahead on the Truckee River looks modest for something so historic. But Derby Dam, completed in nineteen oh five, was the first construction contract signed by the brand-new U.S. Reclamation Service, the agency created by Theodore Roosevelt's Reclamation Act of nineteen oh two.
Nevada Congressman Francis Newlands championed that law, arguing the federal government had to tame western rivers to make desert settlement possible. Derby Dam diverts Truckee River water into a thirty-two-mile canal, carrying it east to irrigate the Lahontan Valley farmland around Fallon. It was the first of five projects authorized under the new law, a working proof that the government could reshape the arid West. The project was later renamed the Newlands Project in the senator's honor.
