Derby Diversion Dam

This dam reshaped two rivers and a way of life. Completed in 1905 as the first construction of the Newlands Project—the nation's first federal reclamation undertaking, championed by Senator Francis Newlands—Derby Diversion Dam shunts Truckee River water into a canal that carries it to the Carson basin to irrigate farmland near Fallon. It made the desert bloom downstream. It also choked the flow into Pyramid Lake, helping drive the lake's native fishery toward collapse and the cui-ui toward extinction. The dam still stands and still diverts, a monument to reclamation's promise and to its lasting cost.

What the plaque says

Derby Dam, constructed under Specification Number 1 and Drawing Number 1 of the U.S. Reclamation Service, now the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, diverts the flow of the Truckee River for irrigation use. It was the forerunner of such mighty structures as Hoover, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Glen Canyon Dams. Derby Dam was authorized by Secretary of the Interior E.A. Hitchcock on March 14, 1903. It was part of the Newlands Project, named in honor of Nevada Senator Francis G. Newlands who worked for passage of the Reclamation Act in 1902. Derby takes its name from a nearby Southern Pacific Railroad station of the day. Charles A. Warren & Co. of San Francisco, the contractor, started work on the dam on October 2, 1903, and finished May 20, 1905. Operational water diversions began in 1906.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 20 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 22 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 23 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Pyramid Lake / Koqyoqe Panunadu — 26 mi
  The Numu's sacred lake at the end of the Truckee—homeland of the cui-ui eaters, site of the 1860 war, and a century-long fight to keep the river that the silver towns dammed from draining it dry

More markers nearby

• Truckee River East — 7.3 mi
• Olinghouse — 7.9 mi
• Wadsworth — 9.4 mi
• The Two Battles of Pyramid Lake — 13 mi