Historic Resource Evaluation Project - Tuolumne Utilities District

County Water Company’s system was expanded, lengthened, and improved to provide
water to the entire area between the Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers. Over the ensuing
years, the use of water controlled by the company was to shift from placer mining to
hard-rock mining, on to agriculture, and, finally, to domestic use, thus reflecting the
changing economic pattern of not only Tuolumne County, but the entire foothill region.
It is difficult to ascertain the exact chronicle of the TCWC, as over the succeeding years
the company purchased many other water companies, some with interlocking ownerships
or directorships, trustees, and operators, so that it is difficult to separate one from another,
or to know when one ended and the other began. This was common with water and
mining companies in those years, as names and ownerships changed hands often in order
to avoid paying taxes, make and redeem mortgages, hide investments, and otherwise
obfuscate their transactions. As was also common with other water companies in the
gold country, many of the investors, owners, attorneys, boards of trustees, and places of
business were located in San Francisco. Some of the more important men involved in the
TCWC included Jonas Gilman Clark, a San Francisco furniture store owner and founder
of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; and financier Francois Pioche of the
banking firm of Pioche and Bayerque, who was responsible for the development of Hayes
Valley and the Market Street Railroad in San Francisco, as well as financing and
developing mining and irrigation districts throughout California and the West.
The Tuolumne County Water Company was organized on June 24, 1851, in Columbia, as
an employee owned and controlled entity, incorporated under the Fifth Chapter of an act
concerning Corporations, passed by the Legislature of the State of California, for the
purpose of developing and conserving the water of the Stanislaus River and conveying it
to the various miners in Tuolumne County. The first officers of the company were:
Nathaniel Bernard, chief engineer; John Wallace, assistant engineer; Judge William H.
Carlton, president; Dan Patterson, secretary; George Graham, treasurer; and 160
stockholders (San Joaquin Republican, August 7, 1852).
English engineer John Wallace was hired to survey the South
Fork Stanislaus River to find a line for the canal. Using only a
theodolite (a kind of transit; Figure 4, at right), because his
other surveyor’s equipment had been stolen in San Francisco,
he laid out a line for the ditch and flume. Digging began in
early July 1851 and by the autumn of 1852, the company was
$75,000 in debt, but had nearly completed a canal and flume
system between Lyons Ranch and Columbia. The system
extended from the headwaters of the South and Middle Fork
Stanislaus and North Fork Tuolumne rivers, with hundreds of
miles of main or branch ditches serving mining, agricultural,
and residential users. Beginning at Big Dam or Upper Dam
Figure 4. Theodolite.
on the South Fork of the Stanislaus River about 10 miles
above Strawberry Station on the Mono Road (State Route
108), where a dam was built in 1856 and 1857 (Figure 5), the system followed the
Foothill Resources, Ltd. 3.3 TUD Ditch Sustainability Project
Francis Heritage, LLC
Historic Resource Evaluation Report