The Water King Dams San Leandro Creek

(On Saturday we recounted the early life and career of self-made engineer Anthony Chabot. If you missed that installment you may want to go back and read it. Today we pick up the story as Chabot secures a new source of water for the thirsty East Bay.)

Water rationing during dry spells in Oakland forced the search for new supplies to shift south to San Leandro.

Chabot did a little capitalist finagling to create another company that would eventually pay him quite well from the profits of the Contra Costa Water Company. He also promised Socrates Huff and William Haslehurst, two large landowners along San Leandro Creek, free water for their estates if they would obtain agreements from other landowners along the creek. They did.

The Massive Chabot Reservoir Project

Work began on Chabot’s plans for an earth-filled dam on San Leandro Creek in 1874.  The project included the dam, tunnels that would connect the reservoir to water mains, a fish hatchery, a new road around the reservoir, and clearing vegetation from the valley that would be flooded. 

Imagine six to eight hundred workmen and 180 horses and mules at this massive construction project. Some workmen were at the dam site, first constructing the sluice that would divert the creek, then digging out the puddle-pit and trenches where the concrete walls would be formed.

Some men were up on the hillsides pickaxing clay to load into carts, which were driven to the dam site and unloaded onto the puddle-pit walls.

Other were compacting each one-foot layer of clay over the concrete walls by driving wild horses back and forth across the top of the ever-increasing dam.

Later in the project, workmen dug a four-mile-long ditch to divert water from Grass Valley Creek, which was piped into a thousand-foot sluiceway. Dirt and gravel—dynamited, shoveled, and plowed into the sluice—was carried by the water’s gravitational pull and deposited onto the clay layers to widen and strengthen the dam.

Some of the workmen were clearing vegetation in the valley where the lake would form, and building a road high up the canyon to replace the road that would be flooded. Others were making carts in the wheelwright shop or hammering tools and wheel rims in the blacksmith shop. Some labored to bore tunnels through the hills to connect to Oakland water mains.

There must have been constant pressure to work quickly, to rescue Oakland from the water rationing that had been necessary in past years.

By the fall of 1875, the dam was 100 feet high. The reservoir began to fill and function after the winter rains, and a little water from the newly-formed Lake Chabot began to reach Oakland faucets. Workmen continued to sluice dirt and gravel over the dam until 1892, when the dam reached the height of 128 feet. Lake Chabot was able to supply enough water to Oakland and San Leandro, at least for a while. 

Rainbow Trout

In 1855, a man caught a beautifully colored fish in San Leandro Creek, which the California Academy of Sciences described as a new species, to be named Salmo iridia or “”. For almost a century, scientists thought the rainbow was discovered here first, until Oregon claimed the honors for the Columbia River when a 20th century researcher found a description of a rainbow trout caught there in 1836.

The dam trapped some rainbow trout in the upper creek and its tributaries. Descendants of the original rainbows swim today in Redwood Creek, a tributary of San Leandro Creek, protected by law from fishermen and isolated from genetic mixing with other trout.

Since the dam would prevent fish swimming from San Francisco Bay up San Leandro Creek to spawn, a fish hatchery was constructed. For a while, it was a California State Fish and Game hatchery, supplying rainbow trout to hatcheries around the world.

Chabot the Philanthropist

His monumental task of creating the Chabot Reservoir was the last of Chabot's great water projects.  He stayed involved with the Contra Costa Water Company, but was soon involved in other projects as well, from iron works to paper pulp, wheat to Japanese tea plants, amateur astronomy to starting the first West Coast cranberry farm in Washington State. He had many investments, and was an extremely wealthy man. He became a major philanthropist. Chabot’s donations included founding a veterans home in Napa County, assisting the Fabiola Hospital Association, the Ladies Relief Society, and the Old Ladies Home, and founding the Women’s Sheltering and Protection Home of Oakland.

Besides the dam, Chabot is probably most remembered today for his donation of an eight-inch refracting telescope and money to build an observatory in Oakland. Today, the telescope, called “Leah”, has a home in the new Chabot Space & Science Center in the Oakland hills. To see Leah on the Chabot Space & Science Center website, click here: http://www.chabotspace.org/leah.htm

Mourning Chabot

Anthony Chabot died in 1888. Flags were flown at half-mast and newspapers on both sides of the bay ran long obituaries eulogizing the Water King. The funeral procession was the longest in Oakland’s history up to that time. He had an estate worth over $1,400,000 at the time of his death, and he left about $100,000 to major charities.

Lake Chabot is a secondary reservoir today. It is also a beautiful recreation area, with a marina and paddleboats, miles of walking and hiking trails, fishing, and picnic areas.

The two sources for this article are: The Water King Anthony Chabot: His Life and Times by Sherwood D. Burgess and The Chinese Laborers of Lake Chabot by Jacqueline Beggs (more from this fascinating booklet next month). Both are available at the San Leandro Library.

Next month:  Sometimes, history is all but lost until someone is determined to find it.  As many as 800 men, including Irish blacksmiths, Portuguese teamsters, and others, labored for years to build the Chabot Dam. But most of the labor force was Chinese. The column next month will be about the Chinese workers at Lake Chabot, and some of the problems and tragedies of building the Chabot Reservoir.

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