Ancient, historic, and modern canals of Phoenix, Arizona


The best place to start learning about the history and geography of the Phoenix, Arizona area is with the canals. If you drive around Phoenix, you cross over canals all of the time. No, they're not sewers or storm drains, they are the water of the Salt River, which is channeled for use as irrigation and household water. And yes, there are fish in them. If you studied Phoenix history in school, it was probably a confusing tangle, as most classes start with the most complex system, the ancient canals. But I would like to start with the modern canals north of The Salt River:

• Modern canals. Those are the ones that are still in use every day.

The Arizona Canal, which brings in most of the water to Phoenix, Scottsdale, Glendale and Peoria. It starts way upstream on the Salt River, north of Apache Junction, goes through the Pima Indian Reservation, curves just south of Camelback Mountain, goes up along the foothills of The Phoenix Mountains (Piestwa Peak) and ends near The Agua Fria River, just south of Arrowhead Mall in Glendale.

Grand Canal runs roughly parallel to that, but further south. When you cross Central Avenue right by Central High School, there is a sign that says "Grand Canal", but usually the canals are not prominently labelled. It ends just west of the Cardinals Stadium, on the west side of the 101 Freeway, in the Agua Fria River.

The canal that connects these two canals together is called The Crosscut Canal. It runs north to south at about 64th Street. It's function is to bring the water from The Arizona Canal down to the Grand Canal. Grand Canal starts where the Crosscut ends, around 44th Street and Washington.


• Historic canals. These are the ones that were built by the Phoenix pioneers beginning in the 1860s and are no longer in use as canals today. To be fair, even the "modern" canals were built over 100 years ago, but this distinction is made to indicate an old canal that has been taken out of use. The most famous historic canal is The Salt River Valley Canal, which was also known as "Swilling's Ditch", built by Jack Swilling. Other historic canals include The Maricopa Canal, the Old Crosscut Canal and The Dutch Ditch.

• Ancient canals. The ancient canals were dug many hundreds of years ago by a group of people that we call the Hohokam. The best place to learn more about this system is to visit Pueblo Grande at Washington and 46th Street.

The image at the top of this post is from the 1909 booklet "The Salt River Valley"
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more