40.469556, -104.934333
Benjamin Eaton (1833-1904) was a founding officer of the Union Colony and was instrumental in the establishment of modern irrigation farming to Northern Colorado. In addition to serving as Colorado’s fourth governor from January 1885 to January 1887, he was one of the largest land owners in Weld and Larimer counties, at one time owning over ninety 160 acre parcels, all watered from canals and reservoirs of his own construction. Taking advantage of the new “first-in-time, first-in-right” provisions of the Colorado constitution that, he constructed the Larimer-Weld Canal in 1878, diverting above a number of Fort Collins water users.
The Fort Collins irrigators joined Union Colony irrigators to ask the Colorado legislature to pass laws to create water courts and for the State Engineer’s office to carefully administer the new water doctrine, so that Eaton’s new canal, the largest ditch in the state, would not rob those downstream of their water rights. So, inadvertently, Eaton’s new ditch played a large role in the development of Colorado Water Law. Typical of ditches of the 1860s, the original headworks were likely constructed of rocks and wood and the ditches of earth.
Today the diversion dams are concrete with wooden check boards and the head gates are concrete with metal rectangular slide gates. This ditch currently has concrete Parshall measuring flumes with gauging stations to record water depth in the flumes. Although sections of the original earthen ditch still exists, many sections are now concrete lined or buried in concrete pipelines through the expanding Windsor urban and industrialized area.
Accessibility
View from trail.
Wayside Sign
420 ft southeast of BH Eaton Ditch head gate, where the Poudre River Trail crosses the ditch – 40°28’07.4″N 104°56’00.5″W
Directions
View headgate and diversion from Poudre Trail – closest trailhead is 32554 CR 13, Windsor, CO. Park at the trailhead and walk .7 miles east to the headgate, which is on the north side of the trail. A Heritage Area interpretive sign is located a short distance east past the headgate where the trail crosses the ditch.
