Diversion Dam

The quarter century of failure began with Arthur De Wint Foote, an engineer who surveyed the valley from 1883 and planned a 75-mile canal with some 5,000 miles of laterals to water half a million acres; it was named the New York Canal for the eastern investors, and the financial panic of 1884 ruined them. Foote and his wife, the writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, lived in a lava-stone house in the canyon near here. Her letters from those years became the basis of Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose.

What the plaque says

Diversion Dam Was completed in 1909 to lift water into an already constructed New York Canal system, greatly expanding its irrigated farmlands. After a quarter century of failure to dig a large canal above Diversion Dam, United States Reclamation Service funding enabled a group of Boise Valley irrigation districts to complete this project. Then in 1912, a generating plant was installed to provide power to construct Arrowrock Dam. It has been preserved as an historical display by Bureau of Reclamation staff. 343 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Idaho Penitentiary — 5.6 mi
  A territorial prison that ran for 101 years on conditions that barely changed, and closed the year its prisoners burned it.
• Basque Block — 7.5 mi
  A merchant's 1864 brick house became the boardinghouse where herders from the Basque Country found beds, meals and their own language.
• Idaho State Capitol — 7.6 mi
  Walls hauled from the prison quarry, heat pumped from 3,000 feet down, and its newest rooms built underground.
• World Center for Birds of Prey — 8.3 mi
  The hilltop where the peregrine falcon was bred back from DDT, and where condors for the Grand Canyon country still hatch.

More markers nearby

• The Oregon Trail — 0.9 mi
• Beaver Dick's Ferry — 0.9 mi
• Basque Country — 4.2 mi
• Oregon Trail — 4.3 mi