Ault Country - Ault, CO - Colorado Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

A two-panel DOT road marker that discusses irrigation throughout Weld County and a regional map on the reverse side. The town of Ault is located approximately 15 miles east of Fort Collins.

Weld County Irrigation

"Here is a land where life is written in water." – Thomas Hornsby Ferril

Hard-pressed to turn crusty sod into fertile soil, northern Colorado's earliest farmers devised an ingenious solution: they built "more rivers." Beginning in 1870, settlers in the Poudre and Platte valleys dug hundreds of miles of canals, transforming a slice of the Great American Desert into an agrarian stronghold. Farming now rivaled mining as Colorado's primary industry; the state's cultivated acreage increased thirty-fold between 1870 and 1920, and agriculture's share of the economy more than doubled. The irrigation methods developed here gave Colorado—and the Great Plains as a whole—a foundation for permanent settlement. Long after most of the mines had been abandoned, the canals remained in use, the backbone of a vast farming civilization. Weld County is among the nation’s most heavily irrigated counties.

"One man alone cannot build an irrigation canal many miles in length and so redeem broad prairie land from the curse of sterility. It takes combined energy, skill, and capital to construct them." – William Pabor"

After carving a tiny irrigation ditch by himself, Benjamin Eaton (a future Colorado governor) saw the need for settlers to pool their resources. An individual might be able to water a few acres, but groups of people working together could irrigate whole counties. In 1870 the Union Colony created the first canal cooperative (or "joint-stock company"), which guaranteed each shareholder a certain amount of water per year in exchange for construction and maintenance fees. More than a dozen similar facilities opened in northern Colorado during the 1880s, including Eaton's colossal Larimer and Weld Canal, which created well over 60,000 acres of new farm land. The rugged individualist may be a western icon, but it took collective effort to make Colorado into a farming state.

Source: Colorado Historical Society

Group or Groups Responsible for Placement: Colorado Historical Society Colorado Department of Transportation County or City: Weld County Date Dedicated: 1997 Check here for Web link(s) for additional information: [Web Link]

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