Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Community Media website (Isabel Guzman). Here’s an excerpt:
April 24, 2025
What’s 4-feet deep, 6-feet wide and 26-miles long? The original City Ditch — one of Colorado’s earliest and most influential irrigation canals, constructed between 1864 and 1867 by the Capitol Hydraulic Company to bring much-needed water to the dry, dusty lands of the Denver metropolitan area. This hand-dug canal, also known as Smith’s Ditch, was engineered by Richard S. Little and financed by businessman John W. Smith, according to local historian Larry Borger. It stretched from its headgate near present-day Chatfield Reservoir, above Littleton, and ran roughly 26-to-27 miles northeast to Capitol Hill in Denver, relying solely on a 100-foot drop in elevation to move water without pumps. When it opened in 1867, the ditch enabled the growth of trees, sugar beet crops and neighborhoods, providing Denver with its primary irrigation source for more than 25 years. The ditch also supported a network of more than 1,000 lateral ditches, greening up city parks and supplying water to offshoots that irrigated cropland and street trees. Its construction and operation were so significant that the ditch is often called the “oldest working thing” in Denver, predating paved streets and railroads. Today, the City Ditch is mostly hidden from view. About 2.5 miles of the ditch remain open-channel, while the rest is mostly piped and buried. In Littleton, the portion of the ditch that runs along Santa Fe Drive from Slaughterhouse Gulch Park to the C-470 highway is owned by the City of Englewood. Englewood plans to convert the remaining open channel between Chatfield Reservoir and the Charles Allen Water Treatment Plant into a buried pipe, a move that would end the historic open flow through the area.
Englewood is giving Littleton a chance to save the historic flume structures — man-made, open channels designed to carry water, usually sloping downward and with raised sides above the surrounding ground — at Lee Gulch and Slaughterhouse Gulch Park. Ryan Germeroth and Brent Soderlin, deputy director and director of Public Works & Utilities presented Littleton City Council with options for the Slaughterhouse Gulch Flume — which Englewood would start construction on first this summer — at the study session on April 22.